I’m With Her
If you whine about endless remakes and sequels and don’t make an effort to see the entirely original ‘Companion’ then you’re on your own.
Companion
Director: Drew Hancock • Writer: Drew Hancock
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén
USA • 1hr 37mins
Opens Hong Kong Jan 28 • IIB
Grade: B+
Wow, our collective AI anxiety is really showing isn’t it? Even when it’s scaled back and said, point blank, “You could never be replaced” everyone’s going mad with robot uprising fears. Alex Garland’s OG Ex Machina, the Megan Fox-starring Subservience, killer robot doll M3GAN, existential faux-kid identity drama After Yang, by all accounts the upcoming Drop – which is actually an AirDrop horror, and yeah, that tracks – and Swan Song are the recent AI/robot/cyborg/clone movies that come to mind without Googling (AI!), and that don’t even go back to the origins in Isaac Asimov or The Stepford Wives. Or The Terminator. Throw onto the growing pile Drew Hancock’s Companion, about a weekend getaway with an AI-powered robot girlfriend that goes… poorly.
And sure, “entirely original” may be a stretch; the imprint of pulp thriller writers like Mickey Spillane and noir titans Raymond Chandler, Frankenstein riffs and probably Alfred Hitchcock are all over Hancock’s debut, but “influence” and “remake” are very different things. Produced by Barbarian writer-director Zach Cregger, the 2022 horror film that made a splash for its ballsy left field narrative turn, Companion similarly starts out as one thing and ends up as another, and takes an equally twisted road to its conclusion. Getting there is a ton of dark, bloody fun. There’s likely to be some muttering out there about how the trailer and the log lines all reveal the presence of a robot girlfriend, and yes I just said it, but that is literally the tip of a very large iceberg that has a few plot gaps and bites off an awful lot thematically, but works more than it doesn’t (the big finish clangs a bit). But it’s not a fucking sequel so bonus. And it ends with a Bee Gees ’70s pseudo-disco chestnut. Chef’s kiss.
“We need to talk.”
“There’ve been two moments in my life when I was happiest. The first was the day I met Josh. And the second was the day I killed him.” That’s Companion’s opening salvo, and not only is it a callback to those great writers, it’s a way to remove a major mystery from the mystery and let us sit back and watch the nuttiness unfold in a way that emphasises the emerging dynamics among the players. Good move. Jack Quaid plays Josh, and I’m just going to throw this out there: I love The Boys, and I frequently liked Star Trek: Lower Decks but Hughie and Boimler’s, respectively, whiny, inept, usually wrong, DGAF about your “growth” schtick as performed by Jack Quaid gets on my very last nerve. So anything he does is a hard sell from jump. There. So Quaid plays Josh, an Entitled Mediocre White Man who’s rented a companion ’bot to complete his lonely life. This is Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets, The Boogeyman), and she’s eager to make Josh happy. Off they go in their self-driving car to a weekend in the country with Josh’s friends. They’re at Russian mobster Sergey’s (Rupert Friend, utterly fantastic) house at the invitation of Sergey’s side piece and Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri, Missing) – who doesn’t like Iris – along with Eli (our beloved Gizmo from What We Do in the Shadows, Harvey Guillén) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, Smile 2). It only takes a night for shit to go sideways, when Iris kills Sergey for being a pig. Like I said. Tip of the iceberg.
Forget the robot girlfriend: the less you know from this point the better. But when all is said and done, Hancock hasn’t really indicted our uneasy relationship with – and dependence on – technology and the dangers that could come with that. That’s not what Companion is interested in exploring, however lightly. It’s more of an indictment of cis men’s uneasy relationship with women, the draconian power dynamics that seem to be lingering, and possibly being amplified by technology, the rising tide of radical conservatism disguised as traditionalism and, ultimately, human nature. It’s all wrapped up in an onion-layers perfect murder thriller, pulled off with aplomb by (mostly) Thatcher and Quaid (!!). Iris and Josh begin life as archetypes – the Nice Guy and the Perfect Girlfriend – and Hancock does a fabulous job of getting to the core of their identities bit by saucy bit. Thatcher is perfect in her emergent humanity, and I’ll give Quaid (looking more like his father each passing minute, oh my god that grin) for making his constantly shifting emotional ambiguity recognisable but unpredictable. I said I don’t like Quaid; I never said he was bad at his job. Companion is one of those movies that doesn’t work without the supporting players either, all solid here, but Guillén’s wryness makes him the standout. This guy needs to be a star. Swift-moving, frequently hilarious (“Are you seriously breaking up with me?”), at times deliciously gory and pithy, if a little on-the-nose, Companion is a great, erm, companion for Blink Twice if you need a double bill for a wine-soaked bitch sesh.