‘Companion’ is a Fun Genre-Bender That Plays Like An R-Rated Episode of ‘Black Mirror’

‘Companion,’ a wicked little genre-bender currently skirting the edge of mainstream popularity, plays like an R-rated episode of Black Mirror. But it also shares DNA with a variety of recent movies that dissect Gen-Z (and Millennial) ambivalence towards real-life relationships, masked by an obsession with technology. If you’ve seen ‘Barbarian,’ ‘M3GAN,’ or ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies,’ then you’re ready for this blood-soaked TikTok Twilight Zone.

COMPANION ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Drew Hancock
Written by: Drew Hancock
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend, Lucas Gage
Running time: 97 mins

Our heroine is Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, devoted girlfriend to Josh, a smarmy loser played by Jack Quaid, the reigning king of playing on-screen smarmy losers. The twist, which I figured out early on but which the movie doesn’t reveal until nearly the halfway point, is that Iris is, in fact, a sex robot. Jack uses and abuses her in ways that feel at least somewhat plausible, though the actual heist at the story’s center is pretty ridiculous. Writer-director Drew Hancock stuffs the movie with gore, twists, and nasty little side plots, but its emotional core, Iris’s journey to self-awareness, and even self-reliance, is deeply satisfying.

The cast also includes Harvey Guillén, from What We Do In the Shadows, and Lucas Gage, from a variety of things but most famously from Season one of The White Lotus, as another couple that tests the boundaries of human-robot relations. Guillen seems to mostly be a one-trick pony at this point, but Gage does a lot with the more interesting and difficult role. The movie’s centerpiece, though, is Thatcher’s performance. She pivots from lip-biting ingenue to action heroine to movie monster and back again.

Thatcher showed her genre bonafides by holding up to Hugh Grant’s hammy performance in the recent Heretic, but Iris is her signature role. It reminded me of Willa Fitzgerald’s turn in Strange Darling, with the same amount of dirt, viscera, and peril. The difference is that Fitzgerald was the villain of Strange Darling. But Thatcher is clearly our hero throughout Companion. This is a movie star, of some sort.

There’s something kind of perverse about selling as entertainment a scene of a sleazy incel tossing around a sex robot like a rag doll. But that’s just the endgame of a clear cycle of abuse in which Josh has trapped his mechanical love slave. In between, Hancock mixes in a lot of clever satire about the way we use and misuse technology, about our inability to actually connect as humans, and about general human sleaze and greed. It’s short, sharp, nasty, sexy, bloody, and fun, full of ideas but without an ounce of pretension on its bones. We may not be living in a golden age of movies, but this genre, whatever you might call it, is thriving.