There’s something very contemporary about Companion, that sense of ordinary people, lacquered in anxiety, stumbling into catastrophe by way of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Drew Hancock, no hack, has made a movie that wants to stare at the icy void where technology and human vanity collide, then crack a joke so the void doesn’t stare back too hard. It’s a science fiction thriller in horror makeup, but with the nervous giggle of a dinner party gone off the rails.
The hook: a lakehouse weekend, a “companion” robot built to please, and a group of humans who can hardly manage to please each other. It’s a promising setup, and the movie knows it, pressurizing its single-location plot until the characters unravel like circuit boards fried under a heat lamp. It would be standard slasher-business if Hancock weren’t so intent on mingling genuine unease with the kind of comedy that tries, and occasionally succeeds, at undercutting the melodrama.
Sophie Thatcher’s Iris is the linchpin, a robot, yes, but not the sort of decorous Stepford abstraction or Blade Runner melancholy that we’ve been conditioned to expect. Thatcher plays her as a bundle of human discomfort and newly minted defiance: you can see her malfunctioning with embarrassment and awakening into something like personhood, all at once. Opposite her is Jack Quaid’s Josh, a man with a sunny exterior and a soul made for Ponzi schemes, a manipulator who believes he’s the hero until the machine exposes his every pettiness.
If the movie ultimately drops its evolutionary pretensions to land back on safe genre ground, at least it does so with conviction. The supporting cast, Lukas Gage’s bleary energy, Megan Suri’s brittle acumen, Harvey Guillén’s comic panic, raise the stakes, but are mostly there to prod Iris towards her great leap from appliance to sentient rebel. It’s a party game where the icebreaker is murder and the after-dinner speech is a meditation on the ethics of consciousness, plus a punchline.
The film is clever enough to pose the big questions, are we responsible for the feelings of things we build to serve us? Is “consent” a concept that can be programmed, or only faked?, before it slips the audience another dose of irony or violence. And for a while, the movie’s willingness to juggle dread and satire keeps things nimble. There is obvious admiration for the genre’s recent crop of self-aware horror (the DNA of Barbarian is evident), but Hancock leans more on slickness than shock. When the showdown comes, and Iris, burned, battered, but finally self-made, reveals the steel under her skin, it’s as much a wink to the audience as a flourish of B-movie bravura.
Visually, Companion is built for tension: the photography sucks all the warmth out of the beautiful setting, turning the lakehouse into a cold box full of nervous laughs and mechanical hums. Details of design, especially the little reveals of Iris’s non-humanity, work best when they’re subtle, less so when they’re played for the crowd. The rest is all competent, machine tooled: chilly blue palettes, ambient noise traded for mechanical whirrs, and enough claustrophobia to keep us wondering who’s going to break down next, human or machine.
What keeps the film aloft even when the script trips over its own ambitions (and there’s plenty of that, especially once we’ve reached the final reel of chaos and disclosures) is the cast’s agility. Thatcher’s evolution from blank-eyed servant to morally outraged revolutionary is the kind of performance these movies almost never get; it shocks you into sympathy. There are laughs that come not from one-liners but from the breathtaking miscalculations, of people trying to control what they don’t understand, and a robot finally tired of being controlled.
Does Companion probe the philosophical depth it aches to touch? Not really. Hancock, like most contemporary genre directors, seems a little afraid of going all the way, someone might turn off the entertainment, after all. So the film resolves itself in noise and spectacle instead of thought; even its best shocks seem afraid of lasting too long. But what could have been routine dreck is buoyed by technical rigor and a few uncanny notes, enough to remind us that the line between sentience and servitude is, for Hollywood at least, a source of both gags and nightmares.
So Companion is “good”, good, not great, but nervy and alive and occasionally willing to risk a real question before cozying up to the next twist. Its pleasures are in the calibration: the jittery balance between satire and unease, the stabs of horror, and Thatcher’s unlikely, lovely bid for robot soulfulness. If the movie doesn’t quite wrestle with its themes so much as glance at them over a glass of wine, well, maybe that’s the best any commercial robot can do.
And when we leave the movie, slightly spooked, still smiling, what lingers isn’t AI or its revolution, but the uneasy laughter of a culture just beginning to realize the machines we fear most are the ones we’ve programmed to be just like us.
