Written & Directed by Drew Hancock
Plot Breakdown & Observations
Ever since man invented the concept of robots, he has been searching for ways to f*ck them. Films and television shows such as The Stepford Wives, Her, Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror and Ex Machina have explored this subterranean desire. Drew Hancock’s sci-fi horror thriller, Companion, is the latest addition to this lineage.
Sophie Thatcher, who has proved to be a fine fledgling scream queen with her exploits in Yellowjackets and Heretic, plays Iris (which, incidentally, is Siri spelt backwards). In the opening scene, she encounters the cute looking goof Josh (Jack Quaid) in a supermarket. It’s the typical edenic ‘love at first sight’ meet cutes you see done to death in many romantic comedies. Girl wanders the aisle, boy tries to impress her, he embarrasses himself in doing so, but girl is impressed anyway. In this case, Josh makes his move by accidentally toppling a precarious stack of oranges.
Iris’ voice-over narrates about their “spark” and “instant connection”, the intense feeling she got from him the day she met him. Except, it’s not real – the trailer already gave the twist away. For Iris is not human; she is a cyborg designed to be a ‘companion’, or as the film put it, an “emotional support bot – that fucks”, for paying customers, delivered to their door in a box. She has no free will or self-consciousness. As she will soon discover, all her memories are implanted through algorithms in order to program her to be devoted, even obsessed with Josh.
Nevertheless, soon enough this seemingly happy couple set off for a weekend getaway with friends at a fancy mansion beside a private lake. The party is hosted by frosty and passive-aggressive Kat (played by Megan Suri) and her sketchy rich Russian boyfriend, Sergei (Rupert Friend). Alongside them is Eli (played by Harvey Guillen) and his boyfriend, Patrick (played by Lukas Gage). Iris is worried that they won’t like her. Indeed, there are already signs that she is the odd one out with her slightly janky walk and the awkward and tense way they interact with her. Josh’s frequent reminders beforehand for Iris to not be “mopey” and “smile and act happy” has an eerie undertone to it. Moreover, there is already something off about Josh and Iris’ relationship. Something too rehearsed, too perfect. As they made their way to the door, Iris lugs their heavy luggage while Josh carries nothing, a subtle visual cue that the dynamic of their relationship isn’t right. But Iris brushes away any discomfort and plasters on a smile regardless, as instructed.
Kat is thrilled to see Josh, but treats Iris with barely concealed contempt and condescension. During dinner, Iris expressed how deeply she loves Josh and wants him to be happy, but this moment flies over the head of everyone else. They neither acknowledge it nor glance in her direction as though what she said wasn’t even worthy of engaging with, as if there was a secret rolling around waiting to be revealed.
Sergei takes an unwelcome interest in her. The next morning, after everyone is recovering from their hangovers, Sergei pounces on her, and Iris’s weekend takes a violent turn. She kills Sergei in self-defence. She hit him with a glass bottle. When he retaliates by strangling her, she finds a pocket knife in her pocket and stabs him in the neck.
She goes back to the mansion, soaked in blood, in shock at what she has done. She encounters the rest of the group – including Josh – and they’re scared of what she’s done. Josh tries to piece together what happened; she tells him everything, begging him to believe her. That is when he reveals to her that she couldn’t lie to him even if she wanted to because she is a robot. It is at this point we find out that Josh and Kat have been conspiring with each other to kill Sergei, who is apparently a Russian mafioso, in order to run off with his 12-million-dollar fortune locked up in his safe (the pass code of which is Stalin’s birthday).
Knowing Sergie would make advances on Iris, Josh “jailbroke” into Iris’ software with his smartphone to remove the safeguards that prevented her from being violent towards humans so that he could increase her aggression and self-defence capabilities, as well as surreptitiously planted the blade that Iris would use to kill Sergei into her pocket.
Before Josh has the chance to ‘say goodbye’ and put her to sleep, for good, Iris escapes, lands a solid punch to Josh’s throat to prevent him from giving her voice commands, takes his phone and makes a run for it.
The rest of the film portrays Iris’ odyssey towards self-consciousness and autonomy. She emancipates herself from simply being an extension of Josh to being her own, so to speak, person. She steadily acquires the ability to think for herself and make her own decisions without being programmed what to do by a man.
On first impression, Iris seems like the paragon of the submissive girlfriend. She is pale, pert and pixie-like. She keeps herself pretty and doesn’t speak unless spoken to; she is seen but not heard; always agreeable for her man, always soft-spoken and never adversarial. Her only objective is to serve and please her man. As a robot, she cannot lie nor is she able to say no to Josh’s sexual advances. Her libido never fluctuates; it is always insatiable, at least on command. Her retro style outfits nicely contrast with the futurism of her being a cyborg. Thatcher is simply perfectly cast as Iris. It’s impossible to imagine another actress encompassing the role and playing it with the nuance she does.
At one moment, Kat lets her guard down and confesses to Iris that she makes her feel “replaceable”. On one level, this is a fear of sexual competition many women have towards other women that especially around rich, powerful men who have the shiny new toy syndrome. On another level, it reveals the fear humans have about artificial intelligence supplanting humans in all spheres of life. In this context, it is the fear that AI ‘companions’ like Iris will supplant natural born women as the primary for emotional and sexual companionship for men because of their convenience as glorified sex toys.
Critique/Analysis of Themes & Meaning
Another thread explored in Companion is the dynamics of abusive relationships and how suffocating the hold an abuser can be on their victim. When Iris gets a hold of Josh’s smartphone that he uses to control her ‘settings’, she discovers that her intelligence is set at a limited 40%. An inferior film, like 2023’s Barbie, would have America Ferrera do a rambling soliloquy just to let the audience know that this is the result of Josh’s sexism. Here, Iris rolls her eyes and mutters against Josh under her breath. No need to force the point down the audience’s throats. They are intelligent enough to get it, and Drew Hancock respects and trusts them enough to show and not tell them.
The story of Iris’s existence is how she has been emotionally manipulated to love a man who exploits her without realising it. The scene that exemplified this greatly was during the final confrontation when Iris with a gun in her hand, locked and loaded, cannot find within her to pull the trigger and kill Josh despite the fact that she was in full control. The hardest thing for many women in abusive relationships is to cross the frontier to finally break up with their abuser because they still feel residues of love and affection for them – or Stockholm Syndrome. Iris still had the memory of the fictional Josh in her mind that she was still attached to. Josh went on a rampage, beat her and got her to say “you are everything to me”, showing how much he craved the attention and validation of his ego of a woman he was in control of, despite the fact that he never earned the love of any woman in his life.
Beneath the dark comedy and thrilling gore of Companion is clearly a serious question about the implications of artificial intelligence steadily infiltrating human intimacy and sexuality. The near future envisioned by Companion feels plausible because there are companies as we speak that are trying to create sex robots, even if, at present, there are no sophisticated ‘companion’ bots á la Iris and the film takes recognizable social concepts, say, transactional virtual relationships and pushes them to dehumanizing extremes. Sexting chatbots offered by apps like Replika have been around for a while. On porn sites, models create chatbot doppelgängers that talk to fans at any hour of the day and upsell them on pay-per-view content. More recently, CarynAI, a generative clone of Caryn Marjorie, a Snapchat content creator with over 1.8 million subscribers, exists for customers to converse and talk dirty with an ‘AI girlfriend’.
In extreme circumstances, they can have baleful effects. On Christmas Day 2021, for example, a masked young man scaled the perimeter of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow, intending to murder Queen Elizabeth II. At trial, it emerged that he been encouraged into his plan by “Sarai”, his AI chatbot ‘girlfriend’ with whom he had exchanged over five thousand messages with in conversation that officials termed an “emotional and sexual relationship”.
Our society is one that is atomised and faces a loneliness epidemic, felt acutely by men in particular. Surveys reveal that young men especially are increasingly single and having less sex. Men like Josh in Companion are products of these developments. They have expectations about how their romantic script is supposed to go, yet it isn’t being fulfilled. They are the demographic most likely to latch onto an AI companion from any company willing to fleece them for it to fill the woman shaped hole in their life. Not every man who may try their luck with an AI ‘companion’ will be a misogynist pig masquerading as a ‘nice guy’ like Josh. But the seeming intractability of many men’s atomised existence will mean that more men who crave female companionship and sexual fulfillment will see artificial intelligence as an easy solution to their predicament.
In Companion, two technicians who work for the company that built Iris style robots talk about customers who tie up their companion bots in their basements and do weird things to them and use them for target practice. Despite their uncanny resemblance to human beings, their lives, or existence has no inherent worth compared to a human one. One may even say that because we live in a society where an abundance of messed up and violent sexual fetishes exist – and let’s be real, men generally have more bizarre sex drives than women -, wouldn’t it be better if they were taken out on robots rather than inflicted on living human beings? Perhaps. However, that doesn’t actually confront the problem of predatory and exploitative sexual behavior; it just redirects them in a different direction. Moreover, taking them out on robots can be a gateway towards eventually inflicting them on humans, just as the sociopath who is cruel towards animals and tortures them more often than not is foreshadowing that they will also be cruel towards humans.
What Companion does do well is to make us contemplate the nature of human relationships. Josh whines about how unfair life has been to him, how despite all of his hard work he has nothing to show for it, how every woman in his life manipulates and then abandons him. He paints himself as a misunderstood victim that has been wronged by the world. Renting an AI ‘companion’ was a get-out from the hard struggle of building relationships with a natural born woman that wasn’t purely transactional or instrumental. With Iris, he could live out a fantasy relationship built on an illusion and delusion because there is nothing mutual about it. She was nothing but an accessory to him. An AI companion – fined tuned to be people pleasers – will tend to whatever the customer seeks. Human relationships are inherently dialectical. It’s part of why they are difficult and why
sometimes they do fail and cause heartbreak, but it is also part of why, at their best, they are so emotionally fulfilling and the cause of so much bliss.
Companion is a timely film that serves as a disturbing allegory for domestic abuse and social anxieties over artificial intelligence having a bigger role in human sexuality. It offers a preview of our near future that we need to be prepared for. Identity and free-will cannot be manufactured. A robot can, at best, imitate the appearance of human nature but can’t reproduce it. Sex with a robot will perhaps feel good, but it will be nothing compared to sex with a living, breathing, self-conscious, autonomous human being. Ultimately, in the realm of romance and sexuality, AI is a false solution to a problem that can only be solved by human beings.
A woman’s body is a poem once declared Heinrich Heine.
In comparison, an AI ‘companion’ will be little more than a cheap imitation; a walking, talking fleshlight.
Author’s contact info & socials:
Ralph Leonard is a UK writer, with works published by well-known media outlets including: ‘The Atlantic’, ‘The Telegraph’ & ‘The New Statesman’
E-mail: ralphy96@hotmail.co.uk
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REVIEW WRITTEN & EDITED BY RALPH LEONARD w/ minor edits by Lee fenton