Companion Cleverly Flips The Killer Robot Movie On Its Head
She was made for you.
It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl turns out to be a killer robot. Except Companion isn’t exactly the typical take on the classic sci-fi horror story. Instead, Drew Hancock’s cleverly constructed sci-fi horror movie is a fun takedown of the AI cautionary tale we know so well. And in the process, it may have given us the most sneakily feminist social horror movie this side of Gone Girl.
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) knows one thing: she loves Josh (Jack Quaid) with all of her heart. The sweetly affable young woman is so deeply in love with him that she’s willing to make the journey out to a remote lakeside villa for a weekend with Josh’s friends, whom she knows to hate her. But this relaxing weekend getaway isn’t what she thought it would be: after Sergey (Rupert Friend), the morally dubious owner of this private villa attempts to assault her, she kills him in self-defense — a shocking bit of violence that unveils a part of Iris’ true nature that she was never even aware of.
Iris and Josh have a very bad, no good, romantic getaway.
Written and directed by Hancock in his feature directorial debut, Companion gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that it’s produced by Barbarian director Zach Cregger. Just like the 2022 sleeper horror hit, Companion is built around playing with the expectations of its audiences before unveiling its big twist: that Iris is actually a robot. Or, as Josh’s friend Eli (Harvey Guillén) disparagingly calls her, Josh’s “sex bot.” But just as quickly as Iris’ true nature is revealed does Companion once again turns against audience expectations of what should’ve been a fairly standard killer robot movie, injecting a surprising bit of social commentary into an otherwise straightforward horror flick.
The reason it all works, aside from Hancock’s admirably deft script, is because of Sophie Thatcher’s wonderfully malleable performance as Iris. Right off the bat, we sense that something is off with Iris — she’s a little too demure, a little too smiley, a little too doe-eyed. However, Thatcher seeds in tiny human quirks that spark some recognition for us: the way her mouth twitches uncomfortably when Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri) treats her with contempt, the way she glances down sadly when Josh brushes her off, and, of course, the way she would do anything to survive. By the time Companion drops its robot reveal (which again, happens very early on), we’re already primed to root for Iris, even as she starts to accumulate quite the body count.
Sophie Thatcher’s slightly uncanny, vulnerable performance is crux of Companion’s success.
Just as good as Thatcher, and another crucial reason that Companion pulls off its tonal hat trick, is Jack Quaid. In another movie, Quaid’s Josh might’ve been the hero of the story, but Companion uses the actor’s trademark nice-guy persona and cherubic grin to play with audience expectations. We expect Josh to be the good guy because he looks and acts like a Jack Quaid character — but then again, so does Josh.
It’s a deceptively simple subversion that is embedded in Hancock’s script, which not only threads the needle with its audience's sympathies but also walks the fine line between comedy and horror. But Companion is careful not to give in too much to its comedic instincts — it’s in danger of becoming a little too self-aware and meta, but pulls back just enough. Instead, Hancock wisely opts for a more earnest tone, emphasizing the real love and emotion that robots like Iris can feel. The film doesn’t have time to get all that philosophical about personhood or whether androids dream of electric sheep, but the intent is there — and as a result, there’s a little more depth to Companion’s killer robot than, say, the dancing meme that is M3GAN.
Jack Quaid, and his typecast as an affable good guy, is a large part of why Companion works.
Despite its subversive approach to a well-worn horror genre, Companion isn’t all that revolutionary. Once Companion’s big twist is dropped, it’s not a movie that keeps you guessing nor one that shocks you at every turn. Apart from Thatcher and Quaid — with the exception, perhaps, of an exceptionally over-the-top Rupert Friend, who chews the hell out of his Russian accent — the rest of the supporting cast are barely more than horror-movie archetypes. But it’s a fun little sci-fi thriller that’s smarter than it looks, and flirts with pop feminism in a way that feels weirdly prescient... and maybe a little too timely.
