Companion, a movie that just came out on January 31st, is labeled as a horror/sci-fi that goes kind of soft on the sci-fi. With the movie being so new, be aware that there will be spoilers. If you want to watch it yourself first, please do so. Actually, please just watch it regardless because this movie was phenomenal.
Starring the ever-lovely Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid, the story focuses on Iris (Thatcher), an advanced AI robot called a Companion and the guy who rents her, Josh (Quaid). There are other characters involved, but the bulk of the cast is very temporary. It’s a horror movie about a robot that kills, what else can you expect?
The opening starts with a little monologue from Iris that we got to sample in the previews. She talks about how meeting Josh was one of the turning points in her life. The other turning point? The day she killed him. There isn’t a moment where you aren’t completely aware that you get to watch Josh die at some point. As I’m sure you can gather that you spend a not insignificant percentage of the movie looking forward to that moment.
By all initial appearances, Josh is sweet and caring, though we do have a moment when they arrive at this remote mansion where we get a taste of his real personality. They’re there to spend time with Josh’s friends. Our cast of characters includes Kat, her boyfriend and the owner of the house Sergey, Eli, and Eli’s Companion Patrick. We don’t start out knowing Patrick’s a Companion, but it’s not difficult to notice early on.
Josh jailbroke Iris in order to bypass the programmed limits that prevent Companions from harming living creatures or becoming particularly aggressive. He sticks a folding knife in her pocket without her notice and sends her off to the beach on her own. It doesn’t take long for Sergey to join her, and since he’s already been presented as a total sleaze with a sketchy job and nebulous source of immense wealth, we’re not surprised when he makes a move on Iris who reacts with understandable distress. This ends quickly with the aforementioned knife embedded in Sergey’s neck and blood covering Iris.
We quickly find out that Companions don’t know that they’re not people. They’re programmed with memories of meeting and falling in love with their owner and can be easily put into “sleep mode” by said owner telling them to go to sleep. Vocal commands control a lot when it comes to Companions, but there is also an app that handles everything from their intelligence to their personality, to even the color of their eyes.
It’s revealed that Josh and Kat orchestrated this encounter in order to kill Sergey and steal multiple millions of dollars he has hidden in a vault behind a portrait. Eli and Patrick were really only meant to be there as witnesses to corroborate that this Companion went berserk out of nowhere despite the programmed limitations. Josh, in his infinitely foolish hubris, thinks he has total control over the situation and wakes Iris back up “to say goodbye.” He explains to her what she is down to the app on his phone, before he’s distracted by something in another room.
Iris escapes while everyone is gone. Understandable, given everything she’s just been told. In the process, she takes Josh’s phone and goes into the app to alter her own settings. She ups her intelligence to 100% from the 40 that Josh had put her at and books it into the woods surrounding this isolated mansion. The whole group takes after her and splits up to track her down. Eli dies in the process just after finding out Patrick knows he’s a Companion and the two have a heartfelt moment where Eli reveals he really has fallen for Patrick. Don’t we all love a bury your gays moment? It really feels like the only reason Eli dies is because it’s convenient for the story later which sucks.
Josh, in his infinite wisdom fount of brilliant ideas, resets Patrick and registers himself as Patrick’s owner, overwriting the memories programmed of Eli with himself in order to get Patrick to retrieve Iris. He jailbreaks him in a similar way to Iris and sets his aggression to 100% before sending him after her.
This goes about as well as you would imagine. Lukas Gage, the actor that plays Patrick, did a great job playing a looming, expressionless and intimidating figure. The stark difference between the fun-loving, doting Companion who cooked for Eli and the man that effortlessly caves in the skull of a police officer standing between him and Iris was skillfully done. He captures Iris and brings her back to the mansion where Josh cuffs her to a chair at the table.
All pretense goes out the window in this scene. Josh rapidly devolves and reveals just how narcissistic he is. Goes on about how he deserves so much more in life and how it’s not fair that it all hasn’t just been handed to him. It’s not hard to picture the type of man he’s supposed to represent, nor is it difficult to imagine what in the world at large would make this depiction so uniquely terrifying.
A man who is willing to dumb down the woman in his life in order to exert perfect control over every aspect of her being is unfortunately relevant to current events. Her looks. Personality. Everything is controlled directly by him and that’s how he prefers it. When he loses that control, he loses his cool and retaliates with physical violence and what would be torture if Iris were a flesh and blood human.
We get a very satisfying ending, though. Iris gets permanently jailbroken by a tech for the company that makes Companions. The app doesn’t control her actions or attributes any longer. There’s a final confrontation where Josh gets an electric corkscrew to the temple, killing him. The final scene we get to see is her free and driving along in a car, seeing another Companion in an adjacent car, as blissfully unaware as she herself was at the start of the film.
While the themes are far from subtle, the movie was so amazingly well done. There wasn’t a moment where I felt the story was lagging and Quaid really drives home that you don’t have to be a neckbeard living in your parents’ basement to be an incel convinced that you’re the eternal victim of your own life.
