Companion Is About Controlling Relationships, in More Ways than One
Drew Hancock’s sci-fi thriller feels like a schmoopy response to Black Mirror, but it’s still a bop.

Zach Cregger, the director of 2022’s surprise horror hit Barbarian, shares a producer credit on Drew Hancock’s Companion, which might reveal more about Companion than one might necessarily want to know before watching it. The film’s marketing, with Barbarian‘s (and Cregger’s) name all over it, insinuates that the two films share some tonal, if not structural, kinship. So let’s recall, then, that Barbarian unexpectedly shifted on its axis halfway through its runtime and turned into a wilder, more entertaining movie; recall still that the film hit peak buzz when uninitiated audiences were told next to nothing about this twist, just to see it.
Companion functions this way too, and its corkscrew plot makes it a difficult film to review without giving the whole game away. To Hancock’s credit, spoilers won’t ruin your enjoyment of his messy romantic thriller (its latest trailer seems confident that’s the case, anyway), though knowing certain pieces of information going in does blunt its better surprises. With that, I will be spoiling its first major twist a bit further into this review (there will be a heads-up) while also encouraging you to see it—because Hancock’s vicious, buoyant, surprisingly sweet movie has, if not provocative, then cozily affirming things to say about identity and the transcendent feeling of unburdening oneself from shitty one-sided relationships, and can be a real bop if you’re willing to play along.
The story begins with contemplative, socially anxious Iris (Sophie Thatcher) having an off-puttingly squishy grocery store meet-cute with a goof named Josh (Jack Quaid). Soon after, we follow this happy couple to a secluded lakefront estate owned by Sergei (Rupert Friend), a fabulously wealthy Russian hipster hosting Josh’s snooty friends for the weekend. Iris initially feels isolated and maligned during this extended trip to the middle of nowhere: Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) are sweet but distant; Kat (Megan Suri), the snootiest of the group, treats Iris like junk; Josh suddenly shows a more furtive side to his otherwise sparkling personality; Sergei takes an unwelcome interest in her. The next morning, with everyone thoroughly hung over, Sergei makes his move, and Iris’s weekend takes a violent turn.
Truth be told, the first 20-odd minutes of Companion are a bit of a tough sell; the performances are stiff, and the stilted interplay between its characters feels assembled from various abandoned CW show bibles. The overall phoniness of it all set my teeth on edge. Fortunately, it’s here that Companion makes its first twist, recontextualizing all the odd and strangely mechanical things everyone previously said or did. Like Barbarian, the film shifts to a different gear, and so does its cast, smoothing out the movie even as Iris’s situation spirals out of control. Spoilers abound from here.
To put it bluntly: In the ensuing chaos, Iris discovers she’s a robot. Here, Hancock’s script wades into shallow thematic waters by jumping back in time to Josh and Iris’s initial “meet-cute”—in truth, a pre-programmed scenario selected from a drop-down menu in Josh’s apartment, where Iris was delivered in a box. He customizes Iris to be funny and smart (just not too smart, an important distinction later on), and, once calibrated, Thatcher shifts Iris’s face from factory settings to warm adoration. Satisfied with his selections, Josh promptly has sex with her, a girlfriend with a remote control. “I feel like something inside of me is holding me back,” she confides with Kat earlier in the film. Indeed. Also, ouch.
Fantastic advancements in robot technology notwithstanding, the near future of Companion feels plausible because it takes recognizable social concepts (like, say, transactional online relationships) and pushes them to dehumanizing extremes. Iris is curated to be Instagrammably wonderful yet looked on as disposable, a plaything accessory to be enjoyed until it’s time to power down. (“Go to sleep” is Josh’s cruel command.) “You make me feel replaceable,” flesh-and-blood Kat tells Iris early into the movie, a line which takes on a more depressing aspect after Hancock twists the knife.
Kat’s admission opens a modest trickle of commentary concerning AI advancement, not just in our art but in our personal lives, gesturing to the slippery slope we’re currently gliding down, put in place by people who will happily eschew personal improvement and an investment in others for the easiest, most profitable path. In the case of Josh, this means shoving aside tricky human emotions for easy sex, and he’s willing to do violence to preserve his prerogative.
There is another twist, and it threatens to send Companion careening into clockwork revenge territory, but Hancock quickly rights the ship by letting the complex emotions attached to this abusive relationship pinball Iris’s choices and, more enjoyably, exploring the comedic potential of his premise. At one point, Iris gets her hands on Josh’s phone and plays around with her app’s settings. She finds the insultingly low position where Josh locks her intelligence and amplifies it; briefly, the film flirts with becoming Limitless, starring a Terminator in a blouse. There’s a great bit where her language setting shifts to German.
As a romantic sci-fi thriller that often feels like a schmoopy response to Black Mirror, its future-as-parable conceit is imperfect. Society, as it exists in this movie, is ill-defined, and Josh’s technology-embracing nice-guy schtick has little nuance. (I mean, “treating women as malleable fawns makes you an asshole” is hardly the most subversive idea to be tossed into a relationship movie, though I did appreciate the sinister edge Quaid applies to his million-buck grin.) By comparison, Iris is the more compassionate, multifaceted character (Thatcher successfully wriggles free of her character’s Stepfordian trappings early on), which, perhaps rightfully, simplifies the film’s conflict. Hancock lets us have fun with the candy-coated easiness of it all. Once Iris breaks free from Josh’s control, Companion becomes a gleefully silly, crowd-pleasing techno-romp, a Turing test valentine for those still learning to better love themselves.
Director: Drew Hancock
Writer: Drew Hancock
Stars: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend.
Release date: January 31, 2025
Jarrod Jones is a freelance critic based in Chicago, with bylines at The A.V. Club, IGN, and any place that will take him, really. For more of his mindless thoughts on genre trash, cartoons, and comics, follow him on Twitter (@jarrodjones_) or check out his blog, DoomRocket.