Companion: Spoiler free headline for spoiler filled review.

⭐⭐⭐1/5

Rob Ryan

I wish I didn't know what the actual premise of Companion was before walking into see it. The trailers did such a superb job of concealing what the wider context was of all of its craziest moments that it shows, including the moment when Iris (Sophie Thatcher) puts her arm on a candle and she just watches teary eyed as it catches fire while her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) intensely stares at her doing it, Why would someone do that to themselves? What is going on in this dinner table? It left all of the answers open ended that the only way you could find out is if you watch the movie, unfortunately some of the early critic reviews more or less give the whole game away in their headlines which not only ruined the movie's first surprise twist in the first 30 minutes, but lowered my expectations going in as this storyline feels overdone and almost trite by this point, especially in our increasing AI driven digital age, with that said though, despite it's initial surprise being spoiled, the movie manages to pack enough punches to make up for that predictable outcome, though maybe it might have helped if the opening narration hadn't said that the movie will end with at least one of the characters dying.

Josh and Iris meet at a supermarket next to the fruit isle, it's a love at first sight situation straight out of a rom com parody, complete with the oranges accidentally being knocked over by Josh, a time jump later, they are on their way to a friends get away house to introduce Iris to Josh's friends, they include Kat (Megan Suri) Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lucas Cage) and the owner Sergey (a unrecognisable Rupert Friend) Kat's boyfriend and the most stereotypical Russian stereotype in recent memory, to the point where his passcode for everything is Stalin's birthday.

Spoilers from here on out if you have only seen the trailer and not read the reviews.

Things soon get out of hand, when Sergey attempts to sexually assault and choke Iris to death, she takes out her army knife strangely concealed in her pocket and stabs him in the neck, in her panic when trying to explain the situation to Josh and friends, Josh switches her off by voice command revealing to us that she is in fact a Robot.

The movie reveals it's hand more and more after that, It turns out that Josh and Kat had set up this whole weekend up for Sergey to be killed by Iris, reveal to the industry that produces robots like her that a malfunction has happned and has lead to a stabbing, and when they take her away, Josh and Kat can take Sergey's money for themselves, with Eli and Patrick (who is also a robot) providing an alibi for their story. But despite this new revelation, Iris is not willing to give up without a fight and she escapes into the woods along with Josh's phone which includes all of the tools needed to control her.

At that point, the film becomes less psychological and more of a darkly funny tale of the most incompetent criminals you have ever seen, as the movies progresses the human characters realise just how out of their depth they are, especially Josh who keeps digging a deeper hole for himself, part of the entertainment is watching Iris mess up his plans more with more deaths, more collateral damage, followed by Josh and Kat having to pick up the pieces. Just as you think things can't escalate to a worse degree, they do.

There is also quite a lot of humour gained with how the robots in this world are programmed, for example, they are programmed with false memories that include the meet cutes for their owners and depending on who's the one programming it, the face revealed in the meet cute scenes reveal a different face of the one who's programming it, Iris also plays about with her programming including inverting her voice, setting her intelligence to 100% (which the movie could have done more with) and setting her speech to a different language, there is a modern quality to how the tech is set up which feels believable but also satirical about how over reliant on machines we are to the point where in this world, they are a substitute for a relationship with a real person.

Between this and Heretic, Sophie Thatcher has proven to be more than capable enough to carry a film with her own two feet. She does such a great job of making Iris feel so sympathetic that at times you forget that you are showing sympathy to a robot, while there are many movies that create empathy for machine that sometimes negate the moral question on whether or not a robot character is worth having feelings for despite it's feelings being created by a series of algorithms, Companion falls into that category and doesn't do much with this moral question as it probably should.

I'm also not sure if it works to have a domestic abuse/female empowerment allegory with an AI robot being the one being abused and empowered considering what we know about AI in the real world and how it's Intelligence is only copied and pasted from a bunch of sources and has no real opinion of its own, Alex Garland's Ex Machina was a more thoughtful movie about ethics of AI robots while also being a thorough look at the characters internalised misogyny, it was such an appropriately complex film that simply doing a "slay queen" approach to the proceedings feels too easy.

The movie also doesn't seem to know when to wrap things up and goes on a tad too long but don't think I'm sounding too harsh, the film is confidently directed by Drew Hancock who also helms the screenplay, the cast are all pro's (Thatcher especially has a good career ahead of her) and the movie is consistently funny and entertaining, just don't go in expecting a deep look at the moral problems it brings up.