“Iris, wake up!”
Early in “Companion,” lovely Iris and her nerdy-nice boyfriend Josh are driving to a secluded lake house for a stay with friends. Iris wakes from a nap and lovingly tells Josh she was dreaming about him. They reminisce about how they first met at the supermarket. All those oranges tumbling onto the floor! Ha ha.
In 20 minutes, absolutely everything about this sweet scene will be turned on its head in a terrifying and sinister manner. You will be surprised and shocked. Unless you saw the trailer, which reveals the whole thing.
And so we begin with a dilemma, dear moviegoer. “Companion,” an exceedingly clever and entertaining sci-fi-horror-thriller-comedy by Drew Hancock in his feature debut, has more twists and turns than a corkscrew. But it’s utterly impossible to write about the film without revealing the first of those twists.
So if you like coming in totally cold to a movie, then we’re sorry to see you go, but stop reading! Otherwise, stay with us — we promise there'll be more surprises to come.
Moving on: Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) arrive at the estate. A nervous Iris stops at the door, worried that Josh’s friends won’t like her. He urges her to simply brighten up and act happy.
Kat (Megan Suri), Josh’s ex, greets them. She is gorgeous, and frosty to Iris. Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his handsome boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage) are nicer. Then there's Sergey (Rupert Friend), Kat’s aloof Russian boyfriend — sugar daddy, really — and owner of the house. The password to his devices is Stalin’s birthday, which tells you something.
Things get dark, quickly. The next morning, someone dies. They will not be the first — this is a horror movie. And suddenly Iris, caked in blood, finds out what everyone else knows about her, but she did not: She’s a robot. Well, a sex bot. A custom “companion” programmed by Josh to be as docile as he wants. He can even control the level of her intelligence.
Iris doesn't understand. “I feel things,” she protests. Just the programming, Josh replies. Her tears? They come from a refillable reservoir in her body. But she has memories, she says — like when they met! Oh, that scenario was chosen from a drop-down menu, she's told.
But now that we’re all on the same page, the action can really begin. For reasons we won't detail here, Iris ends up on the run. What are the odds of a sex bot escaping her pre-programmed limitations? Suffice it to say that whatever you expect to happen, does not.
The supporting cast is excellent — especially Gage, as a Patrick chock full of surprises — but the leads are especially well cast. Thatcher manages to be, while, like, not actually human, way more relatable than the actual humans. And she’s able to convey subtle changes in programming, too — like becoming 60% more intelligent, a neat trick.
And Quaid, with his full-cheeked Quaid-ian good looks, is an ideal choice for a “nice guy” who grows more odious by the minute. One of his lower points comes when he explains to Iris how the world seems to be “rigged against people like me.”
“I don't even own you,” he rails — “you're a (expletive) rental! I deserve so much more than this.”
Hancock is obviously exploring the fertile area of artificial intelligence — the movie is set in a “not-too-distant future” where bots are an acceptable relationship choice and cars drive themselves, but most everything else looks the same. Like it could be us, just a few years from now. Yikes.
The irony, though, is that it's not the cool futuristic flourishes but good old-fashioned human intelligence that makes the movie work. The humor and tone could have gone so wrong, but they didn’t. Kudos to Hancock for making the film crackle along wittily, drawing in even those of us prone to shudder at movies with a fast-rising body count.
“Companion,” a New Line Cinema release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for strong violence, sexual content, and language throughout. “ Running time: 97 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
Jocelyn Noveck, The Associated Press
