Companion review – no thrills, only spills in this AI apologia

Ever since man invented robots, he’s been looking for ways to have sex with them. Pop culture reflects the infatuation: The Stepford Wives, Her, Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049 – and now Companion, from writer/director Drew Hancock. It’s a given in Hollywood: if there’s a female robot in a film, she will be beautiful, and a man will want to fuck her. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the suitably pretty, meek robot girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), designed to adore him endlessly and blissfully unaware of her lack of autonomy.

Yet Iris is at least aware that Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri) dislikes her, making her nervous about the prospect of a weekend at her boyfriend Sergey’s (Rupert Friend) idyllic lake house. Her ever-reassuring boyfriend negates Iris’ reservations, and soon they’re hanging out with Kat, Sergey, and another couple, Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillén). Everything seems perfect – until Sergey winds up dead, and Iris is confronted with some shocking revelations about her seemingly perfect life.

A game of cat and mouse unfurls as Iris attempts to outsmart her Nice Guy boyfriend and his buddies, using her newfound understanding of her robot capabilities to her advantage. Yet there’s something cloying about the film using a vulnerable young woman to extol that AI might be deserving of human rights. Used and abused by her dreadful boyfriend, there’s no question the audience is encouraged to root for Iris and feel sympathetic to her plight. But the fact remains that she is a robot. At a time when the tech industry is continually attempting to force AI down our throats, there’s something cloying about a film so nakedly insistent that a robot can replace a human being it portrays almost all the humans in the story as self-serving and villainous.

This is hardly novel; the robot seeking emancipation from the cruelty of humanity is a trope that pops up across film history, fairly recently in Spike Jonze’s Her, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and even Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel. Companion cracks a few jokes about robot fucking and gestures towards the very real threat of the patriarchy against women, but the film’s cliché premise does little to help differentiate it from any other robot sympathising thriller. The more interesting points hinted at – such as the power dynamics in Patrick and Eli’s relationship – are quickly forgotten in favour of a staid, familiar format that is ultimately as robotic as its protagonist.