Drew Hancock (Warner Bros (UK and US, on general release))
Arriving at a house in the country, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) isn’t sure she is welcome. The owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), is leery; his wife, Kat (Megan Suri), is unfriendly. It isn’t Iris she dislikes, Kat later admits, it is “the idea” of her: she makes her feel redundant.
Iris’s boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is patient and encouraging, but even he finds her shyness and clinginess hard to bear. “Go to sleep, Iris,” he says, and Iris’s eyes roll up inside her head as she shuts down.
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Maybe Josh shouldn’t have set her intelligence at 40 per cent that of the average human. But he didn’t buy Iris for the company. He did so to jailbreak her firmware and use her for dark ends of his own.
Companion, a horror-comedy and Drew Hancock’s debut feature, neatly alternates between two classic approaches to robots. Some scenes, with a nod to the , scare us with what robots might do to us, while others horrify us with what we might do to our robots.
Fellow guest Eli (Harvey Guillén) manages to fall in love with his male robot companion, but he is a bit of an outlier in a movie that is out to deconstruct (sharply at first, but then with dismaying ham-fistedness) men’s objectification of women.
Are Iris’s struggles to be free of owner-boyfriend Josh really a stirring feminist fable or something a bit more predictable? Your life experience will probably dictate the side of this fence on which you’ll fall. But I would feel more comfortable if the script hadn’t had its own intelligence halved, just as it starts to address the issue of domestic violence.
Surrounded by bland, easygoing robotic 'companions', will we come to expect less of people?
Quaid is a decent comic actor, but he is more than capable of letting the smile drop and going dead behind the eyes as needed. Companion, though, requires him to turn on a penny, from doting boyfriend to snivelling incel, and without much justification from an increasingly generic plot. He does what he can, while Thatcher brings a vulnerability to Iris that, in what is ostensibly a comedy, is sometimes quite shocking.
Peeling away from the sexual politics, I found myself thinking too much about the logic of the plot. In the first half, one little illegal tweak to Iris’s firmware sets off a cascade of farcical and bloody accidents that ask good questions about what we want robots for. Surrounded by bland, easygoing “companions”, will we come to expect less of people? Assisted, cared for and seduced by machines, will we lower our requirements for conversation, care, comradeship and love?
Alas, all this is left hanging. It’s a pity. There was much to play for here, and over 100 years of great fiction to draw on (Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. introduced the world to the word “robot” in 1921).
But I may be taking it all too literally. After all, there will never be an Iris. The robot as we commonly conceive it (a do-everything omnibot) is simply paradoxical: anything with the cognitive ability to tackle multiple variable tasks will be able to find better things to do – at which point they will cease to be drudges and become people.
Iris was very clearly a person from the first scene, which makes the film’s technology a non-starter. It may look like some dystopia that has embraced slavery, but however you look at it – as a film about robots or a film about people – Companion seems determined to chase straw men.
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Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
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