Sex, Robots, and Horror: Get Excited for ‘Companion’

There’s a feeling that I get sometimes while watching a new movie that basically boils down to: This should have come out a couple of years sooner.

It’s been happening more and more, probably due to the rapidly shifting nature of modern culture and technology that has only grown exponentially over time, turning an original idea into old news in a matter of months. It’s not necessarily the movie’s fault that it’s “late,” and it’s impossible to fix since time travel doesn’t exist, but it certainly makes things awkward. That’s the feeling I kept trying to push aside while watching Companion, the best horror film of, say, 2018.

To talk about Companion, I do kind of have to spoil the one thing that the promotional material has done a very good job of obscuring, so this is your warning. (The most recent trailer also spoils it, so don’t watch that, either.) The movie takes place in a future near enough where the self-driving cars (which we have now) still look more or less like normal cars. Phones are bigger and can fold in half (which we also have now), and wealthy recluses (which we have plenty of) live in large-windowed mansions in the middle of nowhere.

The movie begins with a gathering of young twentysomethings at the home of some elder multimillionaire, among which are Josh (Jack Quaid) and his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher), a reluctant but willing participant in the friends’ luxury getaway. Iris, we come to find out, is a robot companion that Josh is renting, a fact that, once revealed, sets off a bloody chain reaction from which there’s no escape.

Aside from this thematic twist, the movie does more or less exactly what you’d think it would. It’s not without its fun little reveals, as one would expect from a movie produced by Barbarian director Zach Cregger (a fact that the promotional material is really hammering), but that’s sort of it. (Drew Hancock, who wrote for the early-2010s ABC sitcom Suburgatory, wrote and directed Companion.)

This is Ex Machina by way of Get Out, if you kept only the most obvious parts. Again, there’s nothing bad about that. It’s a very funny, very slick movie with performances from Thatcher and co-star Harvey Guillén (What We Do in the Shadows) that embrace their preexisting strengths, and mean little heel turns from Quaid and Lukas Gage that play off of our expectations.

All that said, there’s plenty of interesting stuff in Companion to think about, especially the stuff the movie doesn’t really address. It takes an easy thematic route through its material: Iris is, for all intents and purposes, basically a human being thanks to her ultra-sophisticated machine brain, and so mistreating her is wrong, and we root for her to fight for her free will.

We like her because we like the way that Sophie Thatcher plays her, but, more than that, we’re on her side because we’ve been preconditioned to do so by all the other humanoid-robot media that’s come before. But the existence of the rudimentary “AI” being pushed on internet users today has muddied the waters when it comes to debating the dividing line between human and machine. Companion is not interested in doing that, and that’s fine, yet you can’t help but ponder it all anyway, especially given the movie’s ending.

I know that I’m thinking way too deeply about what is ultimately a fun, nasty horror-comedy about a sex robot taking revenge on a group of people who view her as nothing more than a lifeless commodity, a hard drive with nice legs and a pretty smile that can be programmed to simulate love for whomever wants it most. In that way, it’s much stronger as a loud metaphor for human-on-human relationships, and the way in which gender roles are exploited to keep women (in this case) docile and subservient.

There’s a chilling moment where Iris’ specs are described, revealing how her intelligence and physical strength can be customized with the push of a button according to her partner’s will, the fantasy of incels everywhere. When Companion is cruelly laying bare the baseness of human desires, it’s much easier to decide whether a robot’s autonomy is worth a human life.