The brand new movie Companion can’t maintain its large secret to itself, however it has others in retailer.
This text comprises spoilers for the movie Companion.
The brand new movie Companion works greatest if you happen to handle to remain unaware of its twisty premise—besides which may be arduous to do, as its advertising marketing campaign up and divulges it. If you’ll be able to heed my warning, nonetheless—and also you wish to take pleasure in some diverting, foolish, and barely gory horror fare—simply purchase a film ticket; don’t even have a look at the poster. In any other case, know that the primary large shock is one among a number of to come back within the director Drew Hancock’s debut function. With my promise to not kill all of the remaining curiosity, you may safely proceed right here.
Companion is about throughout a weekend getaway at a lakeside cabin. Josh (performed by Jack Quaid) introduces his new girlfriend, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), to his closest friends. Right here is the spoiler: Seems, Iris is a robotic. She’s an “emotional help” robotic, Josh explains—his absolutely useful, synthetic girlfriend, who’s designed to like and obey him within the bed room and elsewhere. (Josh disdains the seemingly correct phrase fuckbot.) That is the movie’s underlying premise, recalling an installment of Black Mirror writ somewhat bit bigger; it’s extrapolating the near-future promise and nightmare of advancing AI to think about a world the place digital companions are progressively changing into the norm. Iris is much less a Stepford spouse than a actually grown-up chatbot, a method for a shallow man-child like Josh to mimic connection with out making any actual effort.
The commentary is spiky, if apparent. Quaid has gotten good at taking part in a fake-feminist dork: seemingly humorous and well-meaning, his allure a skinny veneer for lots of seething, nerdy resentment (his work in Scream is one other positive instance). Thatcher conveys Iris’s innocence fairly sweetly; she’s very involved about impressing Josh’s mates, a need that’s concurrently sympathetic and chilling when the viewer learns that satisfying others is a part of her core programming. It quickly seems that there are every kind of perverse avenues Companion may go down in portraying Iris and Josh’s splintering relationship, particularly as Josh and Iris begin to work together with everybody else hanging at this lake home.
Sometime, maybe somebody will make the definitive intercourse comedy for the incel age. However Companion is basically not a satire. The truth is, it’s not even correctly a horror film, regardless of its creepy branding and its midwinter launch date (a basic dumping floor for cheap-and-cheerful shock-fests from greater studios). The movie as a substitute evolves right into a lurid knockoff of an early Coen-brothers work, one thing like Blood Easy with tablets. It’s the kind of plot that ends in deceit, bloody homicide, and additional revelations concerning the forged of nincompoops round Josh and Iris.
As a propellant for the story and its 97-minute runtime, switching from a sci-fi-tinged chiller to a criminal offense caper is smart; the style advances Companion previous its novella premise into one thing extra strong. The accompanying shift in focus—away from Josh and Iris’s relationship and towards the previous’s true motivation for buying the robotic—additionally offers house for one more one of many weekenders (performed by Lukas Gage) to have some enjoyable toying with a secret of his personal. Nevertheless it finally ends up flattening the probabilities of Companion ever getting as creepy or bizarre as its conceit suggests it could possibly be. A producer on the movie, Zach Cregger, beforehand directed the sneaky, surprising 2022 smash Barbarian, which equally wrapped some commentary in with its scares. It was a really unsettling work, one which performed with fashionable foibles of masculinity in a difficult and grotesque method. Companion, in the meantime, rapidly makes clear what a dingus Josh is; the movie appears tired of deeper character examine, as a substitute simply producing turns aplenty to maintain up the momentum. Hints at his latent sadism come very late within the recreation, however Companion ties up a lot of Josh’s villainy within the duplicitous scheme that emerges; I’d have far most well-liked it probing the doubtless wild ways in which his robo-relationship has atrophied his empathy.
Thatcher is left to do the movie’s most fascinating work—maybe unsurprisingly, to these conversant in the actor’s rising listing of credit. A trick of the story is that Josh can alter Iris’s intelligence with a smartphone-app-enabled slider; although Iris is programmed to really feel absolute loyalty to her accomplice, her conduct is in any other case tweakable with a couple of faucets. Thatcher will get to discover a couple of totally different instructions for Iris over the course of Companion, together with numbing dullness, canny super-expertise, and steely aggression on par with the Terminator. She’s greater than as much as the problem; I haven’t seen her starring activate Yellowjackets, however between this and her positive efficiency in final yr’s Heretic, Thatcher has clearly bought elevated scream-queen chops that transcend showing successfully frightened on-screen. She shifts amongst every of Iris’s emotional modes—alarmed, confused, cheerfully clean—with aplomb.
I simply saved discovering myself wanting somewhat extra freaky zest and rather less speculative-fiction-style plottiness. The again half of Companion will get extra deeply into the foundations of those robots’ working methods because it tries creating the cat-and-mouse recreation that arises between Josh and Iris. Though increasing the lore was in all probability unavoidable, it additionally looks like a mistake—extra solutions solely increase extra questions on these synthetic life varieties, which appear to be shut to completely autonomous however for a few security toggles on an app. The decision to each narrative hole quantities to the characters themselves being inept or ill-informed, a Coen brothers’ specialty that Quaid does his greatest to mimic. His progressively rising ignorance makes it tougher and tougher to seek out Josh very scary, nonetheless, because the movie ramps up into extra graphic violence. Companion is at greatest a imply little confection, irrespective of how a lot you already know going into it: amusing, sometimes thrilling, however not one thing with the aptitude to linger.
