Companion (2025) ****

     Men and women, on the whole, aren’t very good at talking to each other, and are even worse at listening. I think that, more than anything else, lies at the root of the persistent fantasy of the synthetic lover, whether magical, mechanical, or produced via some contrivance of mad bio-science. Wouldn’t it be ever so much easier if our mates could not only be built to our physical specifications, but also programmed to do all the things we wish they would do, to say all the things we wish they would say, and to want all the things we wish they would want? Think of it. No more fraught negotiations, no more hurtful misunderstandings, no more unsatisfying compromises, no more unmet expectations. Who wouldn’t be tempted by such a prospect, if only fleetingly and sporadically? The fantasy inevitably shades into something darker, though, if we consider at all seriously the kind of personality that could actually be satisfied in the long run with a lover who could never surprise them, never challenge them, never inspire them to grow or to improve themselves. Then it gets darker still if we factor in the power dynamics implicit in literally creating one’s mate. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that most movies constructed around the premise are either comedies about loser-dorks whose synthetic girlfriends drag them kicking and screaming into maturity and self-actualization, or horror films about the fantasy going hideously awry in one way or another. Companion has been sold as belonging to the latter category, but is actually something more complex than that. Although the trailers aren’t lying about an entitled prick’s sexbot turning deadly on a vacation with friends beside a secluded lake, this movie is not and cannot be the hornied-up Westworld riff that the ad campaign would cue you to expect. That’s because the sexbot herself is the viewpoint character, so that the overall vibe is more like what might happen if one of the Stepford Wives somehow learned what she really was.

     Iris (Sophie Thatcher, from Prospect and MaXXXine) doesn’t realize that she’s an android. Like Rachel, the experimental next-generation Replicant in Blade Runner, she was outfitted by her creators at the Empathix Corporation with a plausible lifetime’s worth of false memories, including the romcom-worthy story of how she met her boyfriend— or, more accurately, her leaseholder— Josh (Jack Quaid, of The Hunger Games and Rampage). Alas for Iris, that’s barely even the beginning of what she doesn’t know when she and Josh set out in his self-driving car to the luxurious lakeside lodge belonging to Sergey (Rupert Friend, from Infinite and Separation), the wealthy Russian lover of Josh’s longtime friend, Kat (It Lives Inside’s Megan Suri). For instance, not realizing she’s a robot deprives Iris of the information she’d need to understand why Kat has always been so hostile towards her. It also leaves her at a disadvantage with regard to Sergey and his other weekend guests, a gay couple named Eli (Harvey Guillen, of Cursed Friends and Werewolves Within) and Patrick (Lucas Gage, from Sleep No More and Sick House), all of whom know the truth about her as well. Nor has Iris worked out that Patrick is a robot, too— although Patrick himself has, even if he hasn’t yet seen fit to inform Eli of his deduction.

     None of that ends up being nearly as important, though, as the secrets the rest of the gang are keeping unrelated to who is and is not human. Secrets like what exactly the host of this days-long party does for a living that could enable him to buy his own personal lake in the woods. Secrets like Sergey’s wife, who is conspicuously not in evidence at the lodge this weekend. Secrets like Kat’s deeply ambivalent feelings about being the Other Woman, even leaving aside the peremptory, high-handed way in which Sergey treats her. And most of all, secrets like the after-market software package that Josh recently installed on Iris’s hard drive while she was “asleep,” enabling him to deactivate the various failsafe systems that prevent androids from doing harm to human beings. This gathering at the lodge is in fact the result of a plot between him and Kat to eliminate Sergey, banking on his habitual lechery toward every woman who crosses his path, and blaming his murder on a malfunction in Iris’s electronic brain.

     At first, everything goes according to the conspirators’ plan. Sergey contrives to be alone with Iris on the shore of the lake one morning while the rest of his guests are still asleep, and makes with the sexual harassment. He won’t take no for an answer, either, having been assured by both Kat and Josh that it’s okay with them if he takes the lad’s sexbot for a test drive, and the encounter rapidly escalates toward rape. And at the crucial moment, Iris takes up the knife that Josh helpfully slipped into her purse, and stabs the big creep right in the jugular vein. Josh switches Iris off just as soon as she returns to the lodge covered head to toe in Sergey’s blood, and all that remains to be done is to call the cops, to explain what happened, and to summon an Empathix customer support team to take Iris back to the shop for recycling.

     But then Josh commits the first in a series of catastrophic blunders: he switches Iris back on again in order to say goodbye. That, of course, requires explaining to the robot girl what she really is, and proving the point by demonstrating the cell phone app that controls her various functions. But since her failsafes are all still disabled, Iris is as able to lash out in hurt and anger as any human in some analogous position of betrayal would be. She doesn’t stab Josh at least, but she does cold-cock him and steal his phone, running off into the woods while Eli is talking to a police dispatcher about the “accident” on the lakeshore. If Josh and Kat can’t recapture Iris before the cops arrive, there’ll be no time for him to run the system reset necessary to undo his earlier reprogramming, and the odds of them getting away with their “perfect” murder decline sharply. They’ll need to enlist Eli and Patrick in the hunt, which will require explaining what’s really going on here, and offering Eli a cut of the suspiciously vast fortune in cash hidden away in Sergey’s wall safe. But since Iris has Josh’s cell phone, she now has the power to alter her own programming, to make herself basically as formidable as she needs to be in order to remain at least one step ahead of her pursuers. The imperfections in Kat and Josh’s crime will multiply rapidly from there.

     In The Stepford Wives, the central horror was that the robot women were mindless automata. They had no interiority, no personality beyond a clumsy caricature of 1950’s suburban domesticity, and yet the men of the community, to a one, not only didn’t mind that, but so preferred it to the messy complexity of life with an actual woman that even those with seemingly the happiest marriages yielded eventually to the temptation of a trade-in. That “one size fits all” approach might have made sense within the consumer milieu of 1975 (although I personally found it the least believable aspect of the film), but Companion recognizes that the 21st-century marketplace demands customization. And having recognized that, writer/director Drew Hancock uses the implications that follow to justify creating the kind of robot girlfriend that could run this far beyond her owner’s control in the first place. The Empathix engineers aren’t here to judge their customers, after all. Some people want a lover with a take-charge attitude, while others are attracted to shyness and deferentiality. Some folks think a big brain is the hottest thing going, while others like ’em stupid. At Empathix, you get the fuckbot that’s right for you— and if you’re the kind of dipshit who jailbreaks the factory-installed safety features, well, that’s your warranty-voiding, liability-absolving problem.

     This notion of customization furthermore creates an opportunity for Companion to be more psychologically complex and convincing than The Stepford Wives, because it practically forces an examination of why this particular person desires these particular qualities in an automated lover. The first thing Iris does upon her initial escape from the lodge is to examine her own settings in the control app on Josh’s phone, revealing to her and us alike just how helpless and dysfunctional Josh configured her to be. This scene throws all of the couple’s interactions up to then into a stark new light, because now we have no choice but to ask: What sort of person specifically wants a lover riddled with insecurities and handicapped by social anxiety? What sort of person specifically wants a lover with no significant talents and no discernable interests? What sort of person, when given the opportunity, sets his lover’s intelligence slider to 40%?! It speaks volumes for Josh’s assessment of his own inadequacy that only by making Iris so feeble can he feel confident of holding his own with her. And of course once they become adversaries, and Iris resets herself to a higher level of capability, Josh really does turn out to be no match for her at all without a great deal of help.

     All that being said, it’s worth observing that Josh seems not to be consciously aware of his own motivations for setting Iris’s parameters the way he did. For him as much as for her, then, Companion is about the dawning of self-knowledge— but what Josh comes to recognize, and ultimately to embrace, is the depth of cruelty to which he is capable of sinking when the raw psychic wound of his aggrieved entitlement is prodded. Remember that everything that befalls him, Kat, Eli, and Patrick in the wake of Sergey’s murder follows from his foolish decision to reactivate Iris one last time in order to say goodbye. That’s how deeply invested Josh is in the fantasy of their simulated relationship, and how certain he is of the unquestioning docility that he programmed into her. Not for one single second does it occur to him that Iris might find it upsetting to learn that she never really existed as the person she understood herself to be, or that this “romantic” gesture of his is in fact the least loving thing that he could possibly do under the circumstances. Nor does it cross Josh’s mind until he’s in the thick of it that Iris might get angry when the truth of their situation is revealed. But the running battle between them that occupies the rest of the film demolishes his illusions about himself— about his competence, about his intelligence, about the goodness of his heart, about even his value on the job market in a strange and roundabout way— just as surely as his thoughtless attempt at a fond farewell demolished hers. By the time the pair reach the run-up to their final showdown, Josh won’t scruple even at overt, physical torture to get back at Iris for making him see himself so clearly.

     Josh isn’t the only Empathix customer in Companion, though, and the other one has taken a fascinatingly different approach to formatting his robot lover. Patrick embodies a fantasy diametrically opposed to Josh’s, insofar as Eli has set him up to be completely out of his league in every imaginable respect. It’s obvious at a glance that Patrick is very much more conventionally handsome than Eli, and one needn’t observe the couple for long to notice that he’s also physically stronger and more agile, a more eloquent speaker, and a steadier, more dependable presence. Patrick is furthermore a restaurant-caliber chef, and although we never get to see his intelligence slider, the mere fact that he’s figured out what he really is strongly implies a setting somewhere in the upper register of the scale, to say nothing of his intuition that directly acknowledging his synthetic nature would risk altering his relationship with Eli in ways that neither of them would want. And what’s at least equally interesting is Eli’s apparent attitude toward being outclassed across the board by the guy of his dreams. He displays not a trace of gloating or triumph, but rather seems as grateful to be loved by such an android as he would be to win the heart of someone like Patrick the old-fashioned way. Both parties, that is, recognize the technological lie underpinning their love, but the love itself is both subjectively real and fully mutual. So while it may still be true that a person would have to be missing something inside in order to be satisfied in the long run with a built-to-spec mate, Eli suggests that the inward void needn’t be as malignant as the one that Josh is carrying around.

     For a movie that leans so heavily on the twin concepts of secrets and revelations, Companion displays commendably little fear of “spoiling” its surprises, and is remarkably impervious to having its biggest, gaudiest questions answered prematurely. I mean, Iris’s opening monologue (notice, by the way, that it plays out over a grocery-shopping scene nearly identical to the one that closes out The Stepford Wives) concludes with her saying that the pivotal moments of her life came first on the day when she met Josh, and then on the day when she killed him. A big part of what makes this work is that Hancock so adroitly misdirects the audience as to what he has and has not told us. Nobody ever tries to out-guess the parts of a story that have already been established, after all, and Companion’s most effective surprises come when it forces us to reexamine things that we’ve been taking for granted without realizing it. The conspirators get further and further tripped up by their incorrect assumptions, and we realize along with them how uncritically we’ve been accepting a version of events with very little to sustain it. It’s quite a trick (especially given how many times in succession Companion gets away with playing it), and I bet Hancock could write a superb murder mystery.

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