Crew
Director/Screenplay – Drew Hancock, Producers – Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, J.D. Lifshitz & Raphael Margules, Photography – Eli Born, Music – Hrishikesh Hirway, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jamison Goei, Visual Effects – Ingenuity & Tower 33 (Supervisor – Garrett Wycoff), Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Makeup Effects – Monster in My Closet LLC, Animatronic Effects – Legacy Effects (Supervisor – J. Alan Scott), Production Design – Scott Kuzio. Production Company – Boulderlight Pictures/Vertigo Entertainment/Subconscious/Domain Entertainment.
Cast
Sophie Thatcher (Iris), Jack Quaid (Josh Beeman), Lukas Gage (Patrick), Megan Suri (Kat), Harvey Guillen (Eli), Rupert Friend (Sergey), Marc Menchaca (Deputy Hendrix), Matthew J. McCarthy (Sid), Jaboukie Young-White (Teddy)
Plot
Iris accompanies her boyfriend Josh on a getaway to the lakeside home of his friend Sergey. The following morning, Iris goes down to the lake and Sergey joins her. Iris then returns to the house, having stabbed Sergey to death after he tried to force himself on her. Josh immediately orders Iris into sleep mode and ties her up. As he reawakens her, Josh reveals to iris that she is a sex android and that all of her feelings for him are programming and artificial memories. As the others debate what to do, Iris makes an escape from her bonds and flees, taking Josh’s phone that contains her controls. She uses these to enhance her intelligence and disable her sleep command. As she hides in the woods, she makes the discovery that Josh conspired to kill Sergey, a Russian mobster, so that he could steal his money.
Since the mid-2010s, we have seen a substantial number of films dealing with Androids and Artificial Intelligence themes. We have had films where androids and machines engage in romantic relationships before going back to Galaxina (1980), Heartbeeps (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Electric Dreams (1984) and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode In Theory (1991) where Data decides to get a girlfriend. There is another whole spate of films where machines develop lustful thoughts as in Demon Seed (1977), Saturn 3 (1980) and T.I.M. (2023). And then there was the android housewife replacements of The Stepford Wives (1975).
The modern era has brough us Her (2013) where Joaquin Phoenix engages in a romance with an operating system, along with android relationship films like Zoe (2018) and A.I. Rising (2018) to the silliness of the sex robot comedy Hot Bot (2016) and the ridiculous Robots (2023) where two androids fall in love and elope. Sexbots also appear in the Austin Powers films, Cherry 2000 (1987) and Vice (2015), while Megan Fox’s nanny bot in Subservience (2024) develops additional uses. There was also the previous The Companion (1994), unrelated to this, where Kathryn Harrold gets a sex android only for it to become unbalanced when she switches off its safety protocols. I also saw Companion only a week after I had seen Black Eyed Susan (2024), a film that pushes the idea of the sex robot into some astonishingly dark and disturbing places. The scenes with Sophie Thatcher breaking out and taking over her controls to enhance her intelligence remind of Thandie Newton’s character in tv’s Westworld (2016-22), while the whole empowered woman android sections owe much to the later seasons of Westworld.
Companion comes with one of the cleverest and snappiest scripts I’ve seen in easy recall. There’s the opening where Sophie Thatcher joins boyfriend Jake Quaid and they journey to the party at the lakeside home. All of this goes well albeit with a sense of disquiet where things seem off, but you cannot put your finger on it. That is until Sophie returns after having stabbed their host Rupert Friend and Quaid abruptly tells her “Iris, go to sleep” and she blanks. As she reawakens and he patiently explains everything to her, Companion turns into a striking Conceptual Breakthrough film. The twist has been spoiled if you have seen any of the film’s publicity, but it works well even when you do. From there, Companion progresses through a series of constant twists every few minutes. And I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of watching the film by getting into these – Companion is best viewed as a work where you go into it blind knowing nothing at all about it.
All of this comes with some highly entertaining writing – Harvey Guillen’s astonished response “You jail broke your sex robot?” Of seeing the flashback where Lukas Gage met Harvey Guillen replayed with Jake Quaid in the role of the dinosaur as he activates the Lovelink. Or of the exchange that Sophie Thatcher has with deputy Marc Menchaca where she has programmed herself to speak in German at the same time as she is also required to tell the truth.
While I enjoyed Companion, I also felt that it is weakened by the need to politicise its women’s issues. It falls into the modern body of what I call Men Are Scum films of the 2020s where it seems that Hollywood has declared open season on men in works ranging from Barbie (2023) to those that go so far as call for the extermination of men like Hunt Club (2022). The end of the film has Sophie Thatcher’s freed android lambasting Jack Quaid for a long line of inadequacies from control issues to being bitter and weak and then body shaming him for having “a below average sized penis.” It simply appears that having conspired to murder, steal and backstab everyone around him is not enough to make him a scumbag, but that his masculinity has to be ground down as well.
This also results in an ending that is frankly unbelievable. [PLOT SPOILERS] It is an ending that is a triumph that works perfectly as long as you frame Companion as a film about a sex android freeing itself from the confines of an awful human owner. Here Sophie Thatcher’s android kills Jack Quaid, takes all the money, tosses away the control phone and drives off in a red Mustang convertible. On the other hand, the moment this occurs there is a whole lot of matters left behind that make this far from a triumphal climax. For one there is the matter of six dead bodies left behind at the house and nearby area, which include Josh and other guests, a police deputy and a technician from the android company Empathics. In addition, there is a dead android where Iris doesn’t appear to have destroyed the CPU and the recorded information that would be on it. There is also one Empathics technician left alive who is going to have his employers looking for him and asking a heck of a lot of questions. Not to mention that Sophie discarded Josh’s phone right in front of the house, which has a photo of the two of them as its lock screen wallpaper and is surely going to make authorities examining the scene ask where the Iris unit is. And you can fairly much guarantee that Empathics is going to have some protocol in place for this eventuality where they can remotely put an android to sleep, if not track it by a GPS chip.
Companion was a feature film directing/writing debut for Drew Hancock who had previously worked as a writer on tv shows such as Blue Mountain State (2010-1), Suburgatory (2011-4) and My Dead Ex (2018), among others.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2025 list. Winner for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress (Sophie Thatcher) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here