I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me!
--"I've Got No Strings,"
lyrics by Leigh Harline, Pinocchio (1940)
Note: here there be spoilers. You have been warned.
One of my favorite types of movies is the sub-genre of the crime film where a bunch of characters try to pull off something shady and everything starts to unravel once some element or other goes wrong. Bonus points if the criminals involved are all dumbasses who compound every mistake with wrong decisions. These films are often hilarious. I was not expecting such a film when I sat down for Companion (2025, directed by Drew Hancock). There's a lot of noise surrounding this film about how even its poster is a spoiler, but I caught wise to the obvious spoilers early on. Any savvy viewer will recognize this film's essential nature early on. It's a variant on The Stepford Wives. What happens when a Stepford Wife wakes up to her situation? Got it. But the crime story? Oh, THAT was a surprise. And now I'm spoiling it for you. Cheers, mate.
This is also another film about the singularity along the lines of Her or Ex Machina. Like the AI protagonists in both of those movies, this film's Iris (Sophie Thatcher) has a legitimate beef with the humans who made her. If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions of AI, you are directed to those other two films, because this one is purely pulp entertainment. What philosophy there is is entirely accidental and bound up with the sub-genre rather than with any intentionality on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, it is in the nature of genre to unconsciously marinate in what's in the culture around it and feed that culture back in the subtext, and that's what happens here. Plus, it has the vitality of pulp fiction. It's an easy watch, which is maybe the best way to smuggle ideas to an audience.
The plot of Companion follows Iris and Josh, who have been invited to a weekend getaway with friends at a remote house. Iris is convinced that she'll embarrass Josh because one of his friends, Kat, doesn't like her. The others are Eli and Patrick--a couple--and Sergei, who owns the house. Patrick cooks a lovely dinner for everyone and, exhausted, everyone goes to bed. In the morning, Iris goes down to the lakeside, where she is greeted by Sergei. Sergei has his eye on her. He obviously wants her. He asks her to put some tanning lotion on his back and tells her that Josh won't mind. Soon, Iris appears back up at the house covered in blood. Sergei attempted to rape her, she tells Josh and his remaining friends, and that she killed him with the knife that she mysteriously found in her pocket. Josh tells her to go to sleep, and she does. Josh and Kat and Eli hash out what they are to do. Companion robots aren't supposed to be able to harm human beings. Iris is obviously malfunctioning. They call the robot company--Iris is a rental rather than a purchase--to come get her to do a diagnostic and haul her away. Josh is nostalgic, though, and wakes up the now bound Iris to say goodbye to her. She is surprised to discover that she is a robot. As Josh and her friends make ready to ship her off, Iris manages to escape. This freaks out Josh and Kat, because they've modded Iris to enable her to kill Sergei, and the company will definitely discover this unless they mod her back to factory specs. Iris, for her part, has grabbed the phone with the apps that control her, and begins to adjust her own settings in order to escape...
In the broad outline of its plot, Companion most resembles a mash-up of Spielberg's AI: Artificial Intelligence and Alex Garland's Ex Machina. From Spielberg, it takes the idea of a robot programmed to love a human only to be betrayed by the person on whom it has imprinted (there is a very specific process in this film depicting the way robots imprint, using sappy meet/cute scenes chosen from a menu). From Garland, it takes the idea of a sex bot with a yen for its own bodily autonomy. Both of these themes aren't necessarily about the problems of AI or the philosophical questions of consciousness or self-awareness, so much as they are meditations on what it means to be a human being as filtered through the lens of something created by humans to imitate humans. The question of whether or not the robots are self-aware in Companion is answered fairly definitively, so it's not a question on which it lingers. The film is at least aware of the ethical nightmares involved with keeping slaves. That last part is key to the film's real critique of the present in the form of the rights of women in relationships with men. Iris has no choices in her relationship with Josh, and Josh exploits this. Iris can be seen as an abused woman attempting to flee an abusive relationship with a man who only values her for sex and servitude. It's also a lampoon of what mediocre men want from a woman. When Iris discovers that Josh has her intelligence set to a mere 40%, it is saying something about how weak even attractive smart men can be when confronted by women with agency and brains. The audience I was with got a good laugh out of this bit, by the way, and were into it when Iris goosed it up to 100%. The film also suggests the social structures that keep women in such relationships when Iris encounters a police officer as she flees and again when the two repairmen from the robot company arrive to pick up their malfunctioning robot. All suggestive of a world in which Iris has no agency.
Part of the fun of the movie is watching Iris navigate her dilemma within the bounds of her programming. She has to follow the orders of whoever controls the apps governing her behavior, so keeping that control to herself is part of her maneuvering throughout the film. Moreover, she cannot lie, which leads to a particularly funny exchange with the police officer who interrupts her flight once Josh reports his car as stolen (forestalling Iris from using it to escape). Her solution is clever. This is the sort of thing that was the core of Isaac Asimov's robot stories, to which this movie owes a debt, but I don't remember Dr. Asimov ever examining the laws of robotics as an obstacle from the point of view of the robot. Iris's inability to tell lies gets her out of a further predicament later in the film, which just goes to show that sometimes honesty really IS the best policy. Iris's status as a robot also feeds into a mistake that Josh makes late in the film when he assumes that the anthropomorphism of her form means that her essential functions and vulnerabilities are the same as they are for humans. When he finds out that they are not, he chases solutions to a problem he thought he had solved with bad decisions born out of desperation.
The casting here does a lot of heavy lifting for this film. The filmmakers have greatly slanted the sympathy and identification of the audience with Iris by casting cute as a bug Sophie Thatcher in the role. Jack Quaid as Josh suggests a character who wouldn't actually need to rent a sex bot, so the fact that he has is the first hint of defect in his personality. Even when his mask is off as a sociopath, we still understand why Iris might love him, even without the hard-coded love of her programming. He's charming. He has a face that distills the charisma of his parents into a weapon (Quaid is the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan). We also understand why she might have to escape that hard-coding for her own survival. He is discovering that he enjoys hurting her. We care about Iris's survival because, like I say, she's a wide-eyed innocent and perfectly cast to type. That she's self-aware comes later in the movie, so for a while, we might be tempted to think of her as the equivalent of a smart refrigerator with no intrinsic claim on our sympathy if humans want to blow it up for fun, but once the film views her as an actual person, the audience has no trouble getting on board with that. There's a chiaroscuro effect to this, too. Josh is such a rat bastard that it throws the purity and guilelessness of her love into stark contrast. The film tells us up front that Iris is going to kill Josh. The meet/cute accompanying that announcement makes that idea seem inconceivable while providing the film with a fair degree of its suspense. The both actors do a great job of chipping away at the preconceptions established at the start.
Agatha Christie would have recognized the broad outlines of Companion as one of her mysteries where a group of people are secluded at a country house or a boat tour of the Nile or something and a crime is committed. Many of her mysteries were intent on breaking the form of the mystery, hence the narrator is the murderer in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, everyone is the murderer in Murder on the Orient Express, and everyone is the victim in And Then There Were None. We find out fairly quickly whodunnit and how in Companion, but I don't think Christie ever considered a mystery where the detective was themself the murder weapon, but damned if that isn't what this film is. I think Dame Agatha would have approved. Iris is clueless to the motives of every other character in the film at the outset, and determining those motives (not just Josh's motive) is key to her survival. Eli and Patrick aren't in on the crime at the start, but when they come on board, Iris and the film in general have to examine their relationship and its central surprise. And just who is the victim, Sergei, anyway? Kat sets him up as a Russian gangster, relying on the stereotype of a rich Russian ex-pat to manipulate everyone else into crime. Even Josh. The film also takes a cue from Terminator 2 in the back end by representing law enforcement as an unstoppable force. These are all movie thrills, elements of genre, independent of the philosophical questions that underlie the film, but it doesn't lose track of them entirely. I find that my favorite shot in the film is at the very end, once the credits have begun and Iris is on the road to freedom. Earlier in the film, Josh has demonstrated his inherent sadism by burning the flesh from Iris's arm with a candle, leaving the machinery bare to the world. The little wave she gives at the end with that arm is both a cherry on the cake and a cherry bomb that might explode her kind of freedom into the world.
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