A sprightly, bloody, black-humored B-movie about fuckbots, the new film Companion is too slick and glib for its own good, but should that matter? It might take effort, but maybe we should try to approach new mid-budge genre movies with the same forgiveness-for-tired-details we routinely employ watching B-movies from the ’50s or ’70s, or even the ’90s. Time can steer us away from age-old trendiness and cheapjack shortcuts, while subtextual time bombs and chewy ideas grow vintage with age. Being out of the original moment, it’s easier to overlook the cheesiness and love the barely sublimated Eisenhower-era outrage of, say, Gene Fowler Jr.’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) than it is to endure a newly birthed genre splat and pardon its failures. Companion feels like a spiffy knockoff, but will it, decades hence?
There’s no denying the film’s gender-war thematic grist, which is also not in short supply these days. But, at least for now, there’s still plenty to dislike about the triteness and uni-dimensionality of director Drew Hancock’s movie, which adopts the existential questions haunting Blade Runner’s replicants and plops them down into a secluded-chateau weekend party set-up. (My god, the least budding filmmakers could do is stop framing up their genre ideas, old or new, with scenarios in which two or three couples go to a remote cabin/vacation spread where things go very wrong, etc. As if this routinely happens. Have a little ambition.) We’re not told right away that Sophie Thatcher’s Iris is a robotic love doll, but we can tell there’s a strange naivete to her, and Thatcher’s near-hentai profusion of cartoony cat eyes and mega-lips can suggest it all by itself. (The film’s ads give it away anyhow.)
Josh had nudged Iris’s aggression settings (on his phone, natch) to make her more fun.
Heading up into the mountains with her boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), the couple land in a swank neo-mansion. Their hosts are surly vamp Kat (Megan Suri) and obnoxious Russian quasi-gangster Sergey (Rupert Friend, complete with facial scar and cigar), and their co-guests are goofy gay couple Patrick and Eli (Lukas Gage and Harvey Guillén). Banter, tinkling wine glasses, and recounted meet-cute stories follow; eventually, after Iris is encouraged to hang with Sergey on the lakeshore, he manhandles her and she knifes him dead, returning to the group covered in blood.
They don’t seem very surprised — and when Josh tells Iris to “go to sleep” and she freezes in pause mode, it becomes apparent that they all knew Iris was a fuckbot (Josh’s term, which he apologizes for using), that they’d set up Sergey (he has millions stashed in a safe), and that the “plan” was to simply blame Iris, decommission her, and split the cache.
How’d Josh & Co. know the assault and counterassault would play out in exactly that way? Never mind, fact-checker: Simply expect that the turnabouts, switcheroos, and opportunities to earn female empowerment and vengeance don’t stop there. The characters’ assumption is that Iris is a mere programmable plaything, and she is — but Josh had nudged her aggression settings (on his phone, natch) to make her more fun, and so a survival instinct kicks in, regardless of how big a preposterous design flaw that is for the manufacturer. Imagine the lawsuits.
Hancock, whose first feature this is after 20 years of writing and/or directing on more than a dozen different TV shows I’ve never even heard of (The Wastelander, My Dead Ex), has a good time checking the beastly misogyny boxes; every conversation between Iris and Josh going forward ironically echoes the patronizing relationship debate between toxic man-children and their ensnared female victims. (“I can be a better person!” he moans under threat.) Suffice it to say that once Iris gets hold of Josh’s phone, and her own settings, the battle lines are drawn.
Companion wants badly to be brat-subversive, but swimming as it is in the waters of Barbie, Babygirl, The Substance, Love Lies Bleeding, Poor Things, Don’t Worry Darling, Promising Young Woman, et al., the movie ends up feeling only cheap and silly. The queasy notion of a man culture in which controllable fuckbots are normalized as relationship material is only lurking between the gotcha set pieces — and because we’re in the woods, there’s no sense of what this social landscape feels like. (We’re closer than we think, you could say, with chatbots serving as companions for some real people. A recent New York Times article interviewing these customers is far more chilling than Hancock’s film.) Ultimately, the movie is merely a diverting, cynical bandwagon-jumper today — but when the class of ’43 casts their eyeballs upon it, if they do, might it seem like more? ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.