Companion review – empty sci-fi thriller short-circuits too quickly

3 hours ago 1

Imagine, if you will, a skewed sci-fi reality that envisions a Black Mirror episode but for an entire movie? Can you even begin to grasp what that would look like? Maybe you can if in the last few years you’ve seen Foe or Fingernails or Don’t Worry Darling or Swan Song or Love Me or The Pod Generation or The Substance or Possessor or any one of the many attempts to recall the magic of at least some of the sci-fi anthology’s earlier episodes. It’s not as if the Charlie Brooker-created series was the first to spin “what if?” nightmares from the dangers of tech but its stickiness has had a noticeable effect on younger creators eager to Say Something about the times we live in.

Companion, a wink-wink pre-Valentine’s sci-fi comedy, is not just part of that trend but also belongs at the back of the long line of post-Get Out social thrillers, standing behind Fresh and Blink Twice, using an outlandish conceit to comment on something we’re all too aware of. The film, from the first-time writer-director Drew Hancock, is an attempt to skewer a certain, familiar type of shitty guy whose outward nice bro persona betrays a corroded and controlling core. He’s played by Jack Quaid, son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, who has cleverly turned his handsome and charming nepo baby privilege into something ultimately petulant and pathetic. It worked well as one of the Reddit-pilled killers in Scream 5 and works well here too, even if his character feels a little under-baked.

I should add that, even if trailers have already semi-ruined the big reveal, ideal consumption of Companion might require reading the bare minimum, rather like least year’s similarly twisty Strange Darling. So consider the extremely spoiler-averse warned.

Cards are revealed relatively early here, though, a relief given how awkwardly Hancock tries to keep them hidden before then. While the best films that lead to a big twist keep you intrigued and maybe unsettled before being genuinely surprised, the worst keep you frustrated at how little makes sense without an inevitable reveal on the way. With every huh or what or why one might utter in the first act, you can almost hear Hancock reassuring us that it’s fine, a twist is coming to save the day. We begin as Quaid’s scrappy good guy Josh takes his hopelessly devoted girlfriend Iris (Heretic standout Sophie Thatcher) away for the weekend (always a bad sign in a modern thriller) to spend time with his friends at a sleek, remote mansion. But she’s convinced they don’t like her and is forever feeling marooned on the outskirts, a feeling compounded when something terrible soon happens …

It turns out that Iris’s unwavering obsession with Josh (sex on demand, a constant need to be near and compliment him) is not in fact a natural inclination but one that was programmed by him. She arrived in a package (their supermarket meet-cute was picked off a romcom list) and his smartphone dictates her every characteristic, both physical and mental. But unlike in the recent Netflix-acquired hit Subservience or in next year’s upcoming M3GAN spin-off Soulm8te, it’s not the robot that’s the one to fear but rather those that have chosen to purchase and then play with her. What does it say about the kind of man who would prefer a dynamic such as this and how much should he be punished for playing god with technology?

There’s some brief fun in the unravelling chaos of a plan gone wrong, when the film recalls darkly comic 90s noirs like Best Laid Plans and Dead Man’s Curve, but it peters out too fast, any big ideas and reveals exhausted too soon. Hancock mostly chooses comedy over thriller but his script isn’t really sharp or funny enough for that lane, its smug jokes about programming and simple, grasping gender commentary becoming repetitive. Quaid is a believable asshole once again but his character’s whiny one-note brand of online sexism is too obvious, the film never quite managing to get us fully invested in the empowered female takes down shitty male thrust of the last act. It’s as superficial yet as assured as Blink Twice was last year, not really saying all that much yet possessing an unearned swagger anyway.

Like a lot of first-time writer-directors (including Companion’s producer Zach Cregger, whose showy film Barbarian impressed others more than it did me back in 2023), Hancock is a far better director than writer, and so the film is more sleekly made than it is thoughtfully written (he adds far more gloss than $10m would suggest), with convenient inconsistencies, a short yet stretched runtime and a rather flat fight-to-the-death Terminator-esque finale leaving things on a so-what shrug. For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.