Companion

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+

               The marketing for Companion was mighty vague other than the repeated and disingenuous claim that it was from the creator of one of my favorite recent movies, Barbarian. In actuality, the writer and director of Barbarian, Zach Cregger, neither wrote nor directed Companion and only served as one of four producers on it (alongside an absurd eleven executive producers). The real creative force behind this film is Drew Hancock, who has no feature film experience and has only worked in television. That’s not to say that having a first-time director is a bad thing, of course, but the frequent comparisons to Barbarian didn’t help with my expectations for this movie or my severe disappointment when I left the theater.

               Companion is yet another AI-gone-wrong story, which I’m already tired of and I’m sure we will be getting an endless supply of in the coming years. Our lead is an irritating beta male (I hate using that term, but I’m struggling with a more accurate alternative) named Josh and his sex robot named Iris. They are going to the woods for a vacation with their friends: an Indian American girl, her older Russian husband and a flamboyant gay couple. You know, the kind of friend group that would totally exist in real life. Anyway, Iris is unaware that she is a sex robot and has false memories that make her believe that she has had a full life and is truly in love with Josh. Things go awry when Iris becomes aware of what she truly is and, without giving anything else away, bloody hijinks ensue.

               Aside from Cregger’s marginal contributions, I can kind of see why the studio would invoke Barbarian when trying to create creative context for Companion without completely giving away the plot. You might say that they intended this as a companion piece to Barbarian (ha!). This film is going for a similar tone in its mix of horror and humor, seemingly also going for the feeling of a lost episode of Tales from the Crypt. The issue is that the plot twists aren’t all that surprising and I didn’t laugh once during the entire running time. Humor is subjective, of course, and it is difficult to describe why this approach gelled with me in other movies but not this one, but I sat stone-faced when I was clearly supposed to be laughing at the zaniness on screen. Tales from the Crypt is my favorite TV show of all time, but not every episode is a winner and Companion feels like one of the episodes that I would skip on a rewatch.

               Perhaps the issue is the overall Gen-Z-ness of it all. For everyone that thought that Wolf Man was too blunt and repetitive with its messaging, I don’t understand why this movie is seemingly getting a pass on that criticism. Companion is about patriarchy and the inability of weak men to handle strong women. If you don’t get this theme the first time that the movie explains it to you, don’t worry. It will explain it to you again. And again. And again. By the end of the movie, I felt like I was watching enactments of short stories written for a freshmen class in feminist creative writing. For the love of fucking god, I get it.

               I also don’t give a shit about any of these characters, who are little more than modern tropes. Josh is just a pathetic loser that can’t find success in reality, so he turns to technology to give himself a false sense of being a real man. We have the flamboyant gay couple, including the stereotypically over-the-top and chubby one that stops just short of yelling “fabulous!” in every scene. There is the hot Indian girl that, well, the writers forgot to include any characteristics for and then there is the stern Russian guy. I don’t give a fuck about any of these people, nor do I find any of them remotely interesting or sympathetic

               The one saving grace is rising star Sophie Thatcher as Iris. I last saw her in November’s Heretic and she is definitely an actress to keep an eye on. I’m honestly not even sure if it was supposed to be a twist that she is a robot in the first act because her performance is so damn good, in both overt and subtle ways, that she gives it away almost immediately. Simultaneously both human and uncanny-valley robotic, Thatcher gives the only three-dimensional performance in the movie despite not being human. And, yes, I know that may have been the writer’s intention, but it still doesn’t help to have a movie where the cast of characters is a robot and a bunch of bland douches.

               In the ever-growing subgenre of AI movies, Companion is like a dumb version of Ex Machina. I see what they were going for here, and it might have worked with a few more drafts of the script, but this just didn’t work for me. I’m tired of evil AI movies, the twists didn’t surprise me, the characters are insufferable, the messaging is obnoxious and I didn’t find it funny. That being said, I saw this with the same four people that came with me for Wolf Man and we again had wildly different reactions. This time, I was the one person on the hated-it end of the spectrum while everyone else was more positive to varying degrees. Take that for what you will and decide for yourself.

Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_(film)#/media/File:Companion_film_poster.jpg