Companion (2025)

***½/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri
written and directed by Drew Hancock

by Walter Chaw Drew Hancock’s feature debut Companion plays a lot like a cross between Peter Berg’s comedy of (bad) manners Very Bad Things and Alex Garland’s solemn Ex Machina. It is, in other words, extremely my jam. Depicting an escalating series of catastrophes like a Pierre Étaix movie with a body count, Companion is a house of cards composed of appalling behaviour and hidden agendas that mashes together tropes from the “Bad Dinner Party” subgenre of awkward horror movies and the sentience melodramas of android fiction. The script is fleet and smart, the cast is game, and damned if Companion isn’t prepared to follow through on the essential human awfulness of its premise. I worry that the inevitable rush of “peeved A.I.” thrillers will fail to offer a credible reckoning with the morality of making a thing 90% of its consumer base will attempt to fuck, if not outright purchase for that purpose. (Some, like flavour-of-the-moment M3GAN, don’t even acknowledge it as a likely possibility.) Consider Companion the corrective: here, the talking toasters are made to be fleshlights capable of having rudimentary conversations. A fun ride that wrestles with the controversies at the root of its concept? Don’t threaten me with a good time.

This is not to say there aren’t missed opportunities in Companion. The intelligence knob, for instance: What does it mean to set a mate’s intelligence at zero? Or 100? I would’ve loved to see what happens when a robot gets the keys to its own specs and decides to go full-Braniac: one fusion reactor, coming up! I’m getting ahead of myself, and though the poster and trailer for the film give the plot away to the extent I’m about to, if you’re spoiler-sensitive, stop reading now. Josh (Jack Quaid) is taking Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his friends Eli (Harvey Guillén), Patrick (Lukas Gage), Kat (Megan Suri), and Sergey (Rupert Friend) at Sergey’s beautiful mansion–acquired, we soon discover, through highly questionable means. Kat is immediately dismissive of Iris, saying, “Looking at you makes me feel expendable,” and we take this as the sort of passive-aggressive garbage certain insecure bullies say to their victims when they’re trying to throw them off guard, leaving them feeling negged, isolated, and miserable. But we gain a different perspective on Kat’s hostility once it’s revealed that Iris is a sex-bot programmed to “love” its owner, Josh, much like Monica is imprinted on android David in Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Josh can set her language–and her intelligence, as I mentioned–and…well, telling more would be sharing too much.

Companion reminded me in all the right ways of Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For, in which Nick Stahl’s gifted executive chef finds himself a plaything for the incredibly wealthy and immoral. It is likewise a refined, thought-through picture as tight as the proverbial duck’s ass. Iris is a compelling hero–a creature confronted with existential horrors while learning to navigate the new realities of her world–and Josh is a compelling villain, a bland nebbish who figures out how to use his toy in a way the warranty doesn’t cover and, in so doing, causes terrible things to happen. What I most appreciate about Companion is how it tackles the A.I. question by demonstrating the need for good beta-testing and impermeable firewalls. What would happen if you actually sold Krusty the Clown dolls with a good/evil switch easily accessible to the owner? What if it thought it loved you? A variation in some ways on George Romero’s service-animal-run-amok flick Monkey Shines, the picture raises the stakes by making the “monkey” a fully functional human being. Brutal and hilarious, morally curious but not pedantic, clever without being an asshole about it, Companion is thoughtful science-fiction and not just an attempt to capitalize on a hot topic. It’s a movie about artificial intelligence that is really about the paucity of humanism in humanity. We are all Tyrells in metal ziggurats; more human than human? I hope we can do better than that.