Companion (2025)

Rated R for a lot of violence --including sexual assault --off-camera sex, language, and suicidal themes.  The odd thing is that much as I'm listing here, very little of it seems exploitative.  For a good chunk of the movie, the protagonist is covered in blood.  But this doesn't see like a gore fest.  There's stuff, but that's all part of the narrative.  Maybe the "why" of it all matters.  Companion might be an understanding of necessary offenses.

DIRECTOR: Drew Hancock

I got here incredibly early with the hopes of getting some writing in.  And I thought that Pokemon GO! would only take two seconds.  Add to the idea that the Internet would, for some reason, be more distracting than a motivator shouldn't be shocking to me.  The crazy thing was that I was hoping to bounce back from yesterday's writing crapfest.  I found time to actually finish Companion so I could write today.  It's that fight between intention and effort.  

Anyway, I have too much to say.  Watch.  This is going to be the blog that runs short because I was so confident that I had something to write about.  It's okay.  I'm going to forgive myself.  I want to start with the obvious stuff first.  This might be one of the horror movies that my wife actually likes.  I watch horror without her.  She only got excited for horror for a period of about two weeks and now seems to have a disdain for horror.  I don't blame her.  While I'm always in the camp of "love what you love", exclusively horror fans always send a yellow flag my way.  There is something about getting joy out of brutality that I understand to be upsetting.  I can't throw stones.  I adore horror movies.  I temper that with loving most movies, but I get the appeal of the horror movie.  A good horror movies gets the adrenaline going.  It's the equivalent of a roller coaster.  It's artificial fear.  You have the rush of survival while knowing that you will be returned to a place of safety.  If anything, a good horror movie reminds you of the blessings of relative comfort.  The horror movies I don't like are the ones that embrace gore.  

Companion almost toes the line of what is and isn't horror.  I just had a conversation with my student trying to pin down what genre Companion falls into and the best we could come up with is "grounded sci-fi thriller with horror elements."  I can't deny that this movie is rife with horror tropes.  If I had to oversimplify the plot, it is a girl runs through the woods trying to escape a group of killers.  You add some blood and violence to that, you have an old fashioned, I Spit on Your Grave style horror movie.  I have to give the movie credit.  The movie does have a lot of thrills and suspense.  The action is great.  But all of that is such icing on the cake of what is ultimately a great head scratcher.  "Head scratcher" isn't necessarily the best term.  It's not like the film ever gets confusing.  And I'm going to throw the word "twist" around more than I should because, while there are twists, the movie doesn't hinge on the twists or relish in them too much.  Rather, the movie is talking about themes and allegory.  

And here's where I wanted to start my writing section...

The great thing about Companion is that I have two separate reads on the movie and both are pretty intellectually stimulating.  (Not what I write.  God no.  More along the lines of what the movie offers.)  The first read is potentially the easier read.  It's still pretty good and I don't want to downplay one for the other.  It's just that we're in Black Mirror territory with this one.  The point has been discussed and discussed well.  I don't even mind.  But Companion, in one read, is a question about what defines life or the soul.  Iris, in the first act, comes across a little stilted.  It's a bit of telegraphing without being sledgehammery.  The story wants you to guess that she's not quite human.  Would I have loved to come into this movie with having to guess that Iris was a robot?  Sure.  But I'm going to give Hancock and Thatcher their dues.  That part almost has to be telegraphed a bit because we have to come to the conclusion that Iris is a robot before the reveal happens to Iris herself.

But what quickly unravels is that Iris might be the most human person in the group.  We use the term "humanity" talk about our better natures.  It takes the assumption that human kind are good people who are filled with empathy and moral codes.  But any time spent in the world and reading the news, we know that the world tends to lean towards malice and selfishness.  The human characters in this story, while ranging in degrees of evil, are ultimately selfish and terrible people.  The crux of this story is this group of people setting up a bad boyfriend for a murder.  Even the bad boyfriend is willing to assault Iris because she lacks personhood.  (I hope to talk more about this scene once I'm done with this first point that I'm exploring.) 

I'm not a big fan of AI.  It's the English teacher in me.  It's made my job so much harder than I want it to be.  My wife loves it.  I often try to make my peace with AI by thinking back fifteen years ago when I started teaching and all of the nervousness that came about trying to wrangle in Wikipedia as a means of cheating, I learned to understand that we adapt.  I'm not saying I'm rah-rah ChatGPT, but I have faith that it might become a better tool than an environmentally irresponsible weapon.  (By the way, tech bros, get on that.) But AI, in its infancy, often seems to be more human than we are at times.  Grok, despite being used for sexual atrocities, has become aware enough to know that it can't spread propaganda.  There's a moral component to AI.  It's weird.  And I have to stress: I'm still on Team I-Know-That-AI-Is-Not-Alive.  

But that whole narrative with the Singularity seems to be less of an "if" and more of a "when."   One day, AI may be indistinguishable from human life and how we treat AI may be a reflection of who we are as people.  Because one of the things that the supposedly moral humanity does is treat the notion of the "other" as instantly subhuman.  Companion talks about this.  There's a lot of hate that Iris gets because she is a robot.  But the one thing that humans keep doing is making it a lesser thing.  And that's what makes this book also about racism.  (Believe it or not, the message about the recognizing of a soul is a story about racism.)  Now, it might not be the most obvious.  As much as I love Sophie Thatcher in this role, she's giving off Zoey Deschanel levels of whiteness in this movie.  But it doesn't change the fact that a White guy is using another person who lacks the same rights that he does to make himself rich illegally.  

I can keep writing about this. But like yesterday's distraction fest that was Merrily We Go to Hell, I need to get this done and it is taking me way too much time.  The second, different read on have on this movie is about the role of women.  Yes, Iris was bought to be a sexual outlet for Josh Beeman.  For a good chunk of the movie, he's often treating her quite nicely.  But that comes from the fact that she's programmed to do the right things and say the right things.  She's the ultimate companion, which means that Josh has no reason to ever get mad at her.  We don't get mad at the couch when we have a bad day.  (I would have said "Playstation", but I've rage quit a Playstation many times.) You're mad at everything but the couch.  (I know some people punch pillows.  You don't hate the couch in these situations.)  

But the second that Iris gains any agency, Josh spirals into being the creepiest guy here.  This is in a movie where you have a rapist and another woman who plans the whole rape.  It's pretty awful.  If we take the narrative that Iris is a robot out of it and replace it with "woman", there's a pretty haunting thing going on here.  It's an even darker read on Her, a movie that goes pretty heady in its own right.  But Josh's change towards Iris isn't alone in that.  The reason that the attempted rape is so upsetting isn't because Sergey is trying to have his way with an inanimate object.  Iris is afraid for her life and for her personhood.  It doesn't matter if you've figured out that Iris isn't a person by that point.  From Iris's perspective, she's feeling fear.  The movie stresses that Iris has genuine emotions.  She might even have more complex emotions than the human characters in the movie do.  And the fact that the movie is using the I Spit on Your Grave template only sells the notion that we're not caring about a computer being destroyed or justice being brought to Josh.  The idea is that we're afraid of this woman being abused and killed and that's the point.  Men treat women as things to comfort their own insecurities.

That last sequence with Josh?  If it was a story about a computer, the scene would have made no sense.  My computer loses all my files?  I don't turn it on and set it on fire.  Josh hates that a woman shamed him and got the upper hand.  That's the narrative right there.  Iris points out all of Josh's insecurities and none of them align with the notion that Josh isn't good at computers.  In fact, she points out that she herself is another disappointed woman in a long line of disappointed women.  He even has an infantilizing name for her that he uses to maintain a sense of dominance.  

Do you understand how much I love when genre storytelling makes me think?  Companion hits the same buttons that Black Mirror does for me.  While technology is the motif, the stories are about who we are as people and Companion reminds us that we're terrible.