Note: There will be spoilers in this review, but I’ll let you know before I spoil anything.
My beloved boyfriend, Patrick, who I promise is not a robot love slave despite putting up with me for nearly 3.5 years with a minimum of complaining, actually expressed interest in seeing this one. Despite it being a horror movie, after seeing the preview before something we saw a couple weeks ago he actually asked to go see it. I, being the horror lover that I am, jumped at the chance to go to the movies after the lull that was everything in January after Nosferatu. So we went last night.
Companion, starring Sophie Hunter and Jack Quaid, was directed by Drew Hancock, a director I looked up on IMDB because I’d never heard of him before, and that’s apparently because according to his profile on there, he’s mostly directed tv episodes, mostly for shows I’ve never heard of because, honestly, who watches 90% of TV anymore?
Apparently one of the producers was Zach Cregger, who was part of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, and also wrote and directed the movie Barbarian, which actually contained twists I did not at all see coming. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for this film.
I like Sophie Thatcher, who plays Iris, the robot girlfriend. This is the second film in the span of the last few months I’ve seen her in, the last being Heretic, which I believe I gave a 4 star rating to on my Letterboxd, but was really about a 3.8 mostly due to a combo of her acting and Hugh Grant’s very funny Jar-Jar Binks impression.
Jack Quaid, a nepo baby actor who is literally a Xerox copy of his famous father, plays Josh, an incel loser who somehow has rich friends and a robot girlfriend. (That’s not a spoiler, they showed that in the previews) One can only assume he works in tech, because there is almost no backstory on his character.
Honestly, there’s really no backstory on any of the characters here. The basic plot set up is that Josh and Iris go on a trip to a lake house hosted by Josh’s friend Kat and her Russian boyfriend Sergei, along with their friend Eli and his boyfriend, Patrick.
Eli, to my great delight, was played by Harvey Guillén, otherwise known as Guillermo from the fabulous What We Do In the Shadows tv series. I’m still sad that ended. At one point, I leaned over to my Patrick and whispered “look, Gizmo finally got a boyfriend!”
Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that after some partying, things get bloody pretty rapidly. The few twists were mostly pretty telegraphed, and I don’t think there was a single point in the film where I was actually surprised by anything.
That being said, the film is reasonably well shot, and the dialogue is fairly well done and the pacing is tight enough that I had problems finding a time to pee – I respect a horror movie that doesn’t really give you down time.
There’s only so much suspense you can have, though, when the preview already told you that Iris kills Josh, so there’s that.
Overall, I would give this a solid 3.5 out of 5 on the Kate scale. You can watch the trailer below:
Ok, spoilers will be below this.
If you have not seen the movie, turn back now if you care about going in blind.
You do you, though, I’m not going to stop you.
Seriously, though, why is there no backstory at all for anyone in this film? We don’t know why any of these people are friends, why Kat is dating a weirdo rich Russian dude, why they hang out with Eli…nothing.
The only bits of backstory we’re really given are both Iris and Patrick’s flashbacks to their meet-cute moments with their partner/owners, and Josh’s flashback to how he and Iris actually met.
The fact that Patrick was also a robot I think was meant to be a twist, but was BLAZINGLY OBVIOUS from the second he’s shown on screen. Either the Patrick character was the world’s closest thing to a Ken doll himbo outside of the Barbie movie, or he was a robot. Guess which one was correct?
The “twist” of her rebooting after shooting herself in the head was also pretty obvious – she started the film by telling the audience she killed Josh, and he was still alive at that point of the film, so the gunshot clearly could not have actually killed her.
I did enjoy that this was definitely a “good for her” popcorn flick, and it was a pretty fun ride. I don’t think it’s one I’d be clamoring to rewatch any time soon, and I’ll probably forget about it in the near future, but it was a fun way to spend a Sunday night.