Companion Review

Thrillers about weekend getaways that go terribly wrong are having something of a moment. There was "Bodies, Bodies, Bodies" (2022), a farcical slasher comedy about the self-sabotaging tendencies of phone-addicted youths. Then there was the horror blockbuster "Talk To Me" about a group of Australian teenagers messing with mystical artefacts to terrifying effect. If we've learned anything from these films, it is to politely decline invitations to remote cabins.

But Josh (Jack Quaid) and his sweet-cheeked girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) show little trepidation when they drive up to a remote cabin owned by a oily-looking middle-aged Russian man named Sergey (Rupert Friend) at the invitation of Kat (Megan Suri), Sergey's girlfriend. Also in the odd mix are Kat's friends, the loved-up gay couple Eli (Harvey Guillen) and Patrick (Lukas Gage).

When over dinner the couples exchange stories of meet-cutes that sound like cheesy romcom fare, it is just yet another hint that all is not right. The next morning, the first dead body drops. And an extraordinary reveal is made: one (or more?) of the guests is a robot. Or more accurately, a companion bot. It is a world where lonely men can rent or buy these eerily lifelike robots to cook, clean and please them as they like.

Blending the prestige of a sci-fi techno-dystopia like Ex Machina with the ludicrous thrills of a slasher, Companion delivers a clear, if plainspeaking, warning about our AI-driven future. Namely our illusion of control over these creations.

But rather than trying to be profound or unsettling, Companion is first and foremost a plotty entertainer. While big questions about our machine-run future inevitably surface, the film is more interested in the little moments of incongruity and satire that such a future might bring - like a scene where a robot gains access to its own control panel and can change its eye colour and intelligence level. Or a darkly humorous sequence of machine-to-machine interaction where one of the companion bots struggles to get an automated car to obey its commands, and must mediate through a password-locked phone app. Such playful, sharply conceptualized scenes keep the film engaging and fast-paced, even as its plot gets more and more predictable.

Sophie Thatcher's icy hot intensity as Iris, another notable performance in the span of six months after "Hereditary", sets her up to be a notable horror fixture. Jack Quaid stays impressively close to Josh's character as his self-possession is revealed to be a slim cover for his misogyny. The other characters played by Gage, Suri, Guillen and Friend are underdeveloped and only functional to the plot. Early on, the film teases more layered writing - like Kat's superiority complex toward the robot, dismissing it as "a sock you jerk off in" even as she herself is trapped in an exploitative situationship with Sergey. But as the movie shifts into full slasher mode, these intriguing threads get left behind.

The film's background score is a let-down - a mix of uninspired punny needle-drops, including Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris" playing in Josh's apartment when his companion bot gets dropped off.

In the end, Companion wants to say less about robots and more about humans. In this sense, it is most comparable to Netflix's recent, breathlessly-paced It's What's Inside, a film that explores human pettiness and greed in the face of godlike technology. Much like Greg Jardin's film about a group of friends playing with a body-swapping machine, the characters in Companion - flawed and driven by primitive urges - end up using machines in disappointingly unimaginative ways, and perhaps rightfully get punished for it.