The bots are coming for us. Companion is the latest in a line of more or less scary looks into the near future, when even the most crucially human aspects of our existence will be outsourced to machines. Am I even writing this?
After Robot & Frank, Ex Machina, The Trouble with Being Born and I’m Your Man – excellent all – writer/director Drew Hancock gives us another vastly entertaining and thought-provoking look at the subject, wrapped up in a “cabin in the woods” story about a guy called Josh (Jack Quaid) taking his new girl, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to meet his friends at a remote weekend retreat.
There, the bitchy and appropriately named Kat (Megan Suri), rich and creepy Russian Sergey (Rupert Friend), doughy but sweet Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his unctuous boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage) will get to know Iris, at a variety of arms’ lengths – some like Sergey wanting to get too close, others like Kat wanting nothing to do with her. All attitudes driven by the fact that Iris is a robot – Hancock presents it as a shock reveal though the script and performances are hinting in that direction from the beginning. And Iris is Siri backwards so…
Apologies if that’s a spoiler but that development comes early on and there are plenty more twists and turns in this nicely askance tale in which Iris functions as a sounding board as each of the other characters steps forward in turn to pose the age-old question – Am I the asshole?
Isaac Azimov’s laws about robots doing no harm to humans are invoked, male chauvinism is examined in the relationship of owner to bot and male to female. The sweetly compliant Iris is in essence the tradwife, orienting herself entirely towards the needs of her man. But what if someone dicks with the programming, disarms the Azimovian filters and bumps Iris’s intelligence up to 100 per cent? Shades of Scarlett Johansson wreaking mass destruction in Lucy.
We’re on Iris’s side, as we would be watching rescue dogs in a late-night doomscroll, since this is ultimately a story about abuse, though it’s done as a techy black comedy, with things getting more farcical and the plot chicaning about ever more wildly as the bloody finale approaches.
Sophie Thatcher is particularly good. Last seen (by me) being monstered by Hugh Grant in Heretic, she switchbacks between the doting girlfriend full of romantic notions and the babe who’s oddly good at meteorological reports. Her mettle is really put to the test in the scene where Iris is told she is a robot by the assembled gang. Her face as it’s revealed that Iris and Josh did not meet cute in a restaurant. In fact she was delivered to his apartment in a crate and he unpacked her like something from a YouTube unboxing video. Lukas Gage also cuts through, helped by the fact that Patrick is a far more interesting character than he originally seems.
Hancock hits us with some eye-rollers, like what if the humans turned out to be more inhuman than the bots, but for the most part he keeps things charging along in the sort of entertaining, smart and breathless way that Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard used to specialise in before they got diverted into various Marvel projects.
Transitional dramatic moments aren’t Hancock’s strong point. He’s more about the big concept than detail and human nuance. But the big concept is good and the way he handles it is fresh and funny, even if by the end he’s more or less signalling plot exhaustion by taking the story off into a whole other direction – the search for Sergey’s hidden bundles of loot. Something AI would probably never do. Right?
Companion – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
