Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Body and Soul: Review of Companion
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
What is it that makes us human? Is it sentience, emotional awareness, empathy, intelligence, or the knowledge of our own mortality? Is it the ability to manipulate our environment? We share many of these qualities with our fellow creatures. Birds build their own nests. Beavers build their own lake homes—and lakes. Most species care for and protect (and love?) their young. Some, like wolves, mate for life—which is better than many humans. Ants go to war with their own kind. Octopuses can learn, use tools, solve problems, and learn from experience. Yet, despite these similarities to our fellow earthlings, in their supreme arrogance, humans believe they are superior to all other living beings, that we are kings of this world.
This elusive question of the nature of humanity is also addressed in the science-fiction subgenre of robot movies. Films like Blade Runner, The Wild Robot, Bicentennial Man, The Iron Giant, The Stepford Wives, AI, Ex Machina, Chappie, and many more only scratch the surface of movies that interrogate the nature of the human condition. In varying degrees, they address what makes a bucket of bolts and circuits human, how emotionality, self-awareness, creativity, and a soul, can arise from a synthetic being
The most recent movie to address this topic—among others—is Companion, a fun mash-up of science-fiction, thriller, comedy, and even rom-com elements. At the beginning of the film, we hear a young woman’s voice-over describing the beautiful moment when she first met her boyfriend and then fade in to a tender and funny first encounter at a grocery store. We then formally meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and herideal man Josh (Jack Quaid) as they are on their way to a weekend getaway at a remote lake cabin.
Iris is very nervous about meeting some of the other people at the cabin, including Kat (Megan Suri), her boyfriend—and owner of the place—Sergey (Rupert Friend), Eli (Harvey Guillen), and Patrick (Lukas Gage), but when they get there, things seem to be going well. Sergey shows off his home and brags about the property. Eli and Patrick seem to be very much in love, especially as Patrick tells the story of how they met—a tale as cute as Iris and Josh’s first meeting.
The next day, Sergey attempts to assault Iris at the beach. She kills him with a pocketknife that somehow mysteriously ended up in her pocket. When she returns to the house blood-soaked and shaken, Josh tells her to go to sleep, and she shuts down immediately. She is a robot. Josh, Kat, and the others tie her up and when she awakes, Josh tells Iris that she is a companion robot, a “sexbot” that has been programmed to serve him. He reveals that he controls everything from her intelligence level, the language she speaks, her eye color, to time and weather notifications (a brilliant stroke of humor as she chirps out the temp and time whenever prompted), and aggressiveness through his phone.
He tells her the memory of their first meeting was actually a virtual pairing, a “love link” that programmed Josh as the man she loved, so their very cute first encounter in the grocery story was a prefab memory. Iris is devastated, not only because she’s discovered she is a robot, but because it’s obvious Josh doesn’t love her. She escapes, taking Josh’s phone with her, and runs off into the woods.
Her escape has thrown a giant monkey wrench into Josh and Kat’s plan, which was to kill Sergey and steal the twelve million dollars hidden in his enormous wall safe. They are forced to incorporate Eli and Patrick into their plans and go out to hunt Iris, who has managed to get into the program on Josh’s phone and increase her intelligence.
What follows then is a roller-coaster ride of thrills, chills, gore, surprises—and a few laughs. Director and writer Drew Hancock has crafted not only a very entertaining film, but a very cleverly rendered comment on feminism, politics, and technology.
Josh literally owns (well, rents) Iris body and soul without her awareness or consent. She has been fooled—programmed—into believing that she loves Josh and that he loves her. Like any good girlfriend (or Stepford wife), she would do anything for him. After sex, when Iris begins to talk, he tells her to go to sleep and rolls over. Art imitates life.
Iris cannot even lie—unless she is programmed to do so. This tripe is Hancock’s scathing take the mechanics of complete patriarchal domination. To Iris’ credit, after she escapes and reprograms her intelligence on Josh’s phone (a program that looks eerily close to present technology), she begins to assert her independence and fight for very survival.
Hancock also examines how technology is a dehumanizing force in our world where our most intimate relationships have been reduced to rent-a-bot, a theme examines technology’s effect on society that is also addressed in the limited series Black Mirror. Josh has seemed to have misplaced his humanity, replacing intimacy and trust with convenience and control.
Aside from these sidesteps into social commentary, Hancock has created a very compelling and entertaining thriller with generous dashes of irony thrown in. It is a fun movie and a clever one. When Iris is stopped by a cop, and knowing she cannot lie to him, she reverts her language to German, which she assumes the officer will not know. So, she tells him the truth, only not in English, which he doesn’t understand. It is one of those movie moments that causes a collective “ah” in the theater.
While the plot is a little busy and overly contrived—at times it reminded me of a 1960s Roger Corman drive-in movie—it works. A good part of this is because of Sophie Thatcher’s portrayal of Iris. From the very beginning, as she is pushing her shopping cart on her way to meet Josh, there is a freshness and innocence about her, even though her gait and movements seem a little herky-jerky and weird, as if she is just getting used to her new body. She is a combination of adorable and the epitome of vulnerable. She even dresses in cutesy little girl outfits much of the time. The rest of the acting in the ensemble is not exactly stellar, but adequate. Quaid’s Josh is weaselly and smarmy—which he does well, but the character is little more than a stereotypical sketch.
While it is entertaining, Companion still poses some tough questions. Is Iris only a machine? Is her apprehension about meeting Josh’s friends a product of programming or emotional self-awareness? Where does programming stop and sensibility begin? Iris is programmed to love Josh unconditionally, yet at the end, when that programming has been disrupted, her feelings remain. And why would a sexbot have such a strong instinct for survival? Wouldn’t it simply accept its fate? And who is writing the programming? Probably a man.
And, finally, does technology rob us of our humanity? When we stand at a bus stop staring at our phones and not even making eye contact with our fellow humans, lost in our virtual realities, will we be replacing genuine human relationships with technology—like Iris?
Companion is a fun film. There are enough surprises to keep the audience on its toes and enough sophistication to make us consider bigger existential questions for ourselves–without having to look them up on Google, Reddit, or Instagram.
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