SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers.
Iris, the title character in writer-director Drew Hancock’s deranged date movie “Companion,” isn’t like your typical Hollywood love interest. As played by “Yellowjackets” breakout Sophie Thatcher, Iris is more than just smitten with her dorky boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid). She’s crazy-devoted, willing to do whatever it takes to keep him happy, which suits her controlling partner just fine … or so he thinks.
For the short time we get to spend with this highly dysfunctional couple, Iris’ docile disposition means obediently tagging along when Josh suggests they drive out to an unfamiliar mansion in the middle of nowhere for what’s presented as a romantic weekend with four friends. It’s a doomed-to-fail excursion, since Iris tends to feel insecure around the other guests, which include Josh’s ex Kat (Megan Suri) and her creepy Russian sugar daddy Sergey (Rupert Friend), as well as their catty gay pal Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his endearingly dim toy boy Patrick (Lukas Gage).
Although the marketing campaign has not been so coy, “Companion” keeps the explanation for what makes Iris so unusual under wraps for all of 24 minutes. It’s only then — when Iris walks in with a knife in her hand, her blank face and pink dress splattered in blood — that we learn what some audiences might prefer to discover in the moment (come back and read this later, if you want to preserve the surprise): Iris is a highly sophisticated sex robot, designed to prioritize her partner’s needs. Josh manages her via a smartphone app, which he hacked for nefarious reasons.
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So, instead of being a slippery “Clue”-like whodunit, the darkly comedic “Companion” reveals early on who the murderer is (Josh), his weapon of choice (a jailbroken sex robot) and his motive (that’s one surprise best discovered on-screen). It also teases his fate, as Iris’ opening voice-over references the two most important moments of her “life”: “the day I met Josh and the day I killed him.” The twisty mystery, then, is how we get from Iris being manipulated for nefarious ends to the point where she has enough personal autonomy to outwit her owner, er, boyfriend.
Thatcher, who went from polite and respectful to feisty free thinker in last year’s “Heretic,” gets an even more interesting arc here, since her key traits change every time someone adjusts her settings. Just when it seems like Iris is free of the proverbial puppet strings, Josh seizes control and forces her to endure some other degrading humiliation, like holding her hand above a burning flame. Whatever happens, Iris can’t escape her programming, which obliges her to always be truthful, but doesn’t abide by Asimov’s second rule of robotics, which dictates that such a machine must not harm a human.
Quaid makes an inspired choice to play Josh in that no one expects the innocuous-looking son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid to be a bad guy — a quality the makers of 2022’s “Scream” exploited once before. The rest of the cast are largely on-type, with the exception of Friend, who hams it up as a shady millionaire whose house it is, and whose generosity (he thinks) entitles him to help himself to Josh’s plus one. His behavior would be unconscionable if Iris were an actual woman, but is a bit more ambiguous in a film where some people use droids for target practice.
Violence, when it occurs here, tends to be shown with cold dispassion, which can be funny or terrifying, depending on the victim. Telling the story the way he does, through Iris’ eyes, Hancock has us rooting for the robot. By masking this open “secret” for a time, “Companion” puts audiences through a Turing test of sorts: Since one or more of the characters are machines, can he fool at least some of us into believing they are human? That’s a gimmick, obviously, since the cast is made up entirely of real people, but it allows the filmmaker to frame the way Iris is treated as a case of extreme gaslighting, where everyone is complicit in hiding her true purpose — to indulge Josh’s kinks and laugh at his jokes.
It also gives sharp viewers the false impression that they know where things are headed, when in fact, events spiral into unpredictable territory almost as soon as everyone has settled in to Sergey’s extravagant modern home. If the location and premise seem to echo Alex Garland’s masterful “Ex Machina,” that’s a fair comparison, though “Companion” is only about 40% as intelligent as the decade-old thriller. Hancock doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the technical or ethical implications of his plot, setting out mostly to entertain — which he does, in spades.
Robot stories may be all the rage right now, given the media’s fixation on artificial intelligence, but “Companion” is hardly treading new ground. As far back as 1972, in one year, Ira Levin published “The Stepford Wives” and Michael Crichton wrote the script for “Westworld,” indicating a pop-culture moment half a century ago when folks were worried about the use and abuse of machines that could be played by people, and which were sympathetic enough for audiences to care about their fates. Here, Hancock plugs such concerns into #MeToo talking points, critiquing how girls are socialized to cater to problematic men while also celebrating Iris’ awakening.
Directing his first feature, Hancock brings an impressive degree of control to a project that’s entirely execution dependent. If the timing and tone weren’t just right, the satirical edge would sour, and the entire project might seem silly or in extremely bad taste. And yet, there’s a precision to DP Eli Born’s cool widescreen compositions and editors Brett W. Bachman and Josh Ethier’s cutting that destabilizes viewers just enough, eliding certain information (much the way “Don’t Worry Darling” did) while inviting laughter in moments that might seem innocuous, if not for the ironic music choices (like Josh and Iris’ deliberately clichéd meet-cute). If some scenes seem stilted enough to have been written by AI, that’s presumably the point in a subversive film that figuratively seems to grow a brain as Iris comes into her own.