Companion

From the genre-defining image of Maria and her chrome curves in 1927’s Metropolis, to Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Ana de Armas’ sultry Joi in Blade Runner 2049, hot robots have never been out of style. But with the rise of AI chatbots ready to profess their love, the futurism of Spike Jonze’s Her seems closer than ever before. The next logical step is Companion, in which even your android partner’s intelligence level can be customised by an app on your phone. God help us.

Companion, produced by the team behind Barbarian, opens with a prologue that’s a neat homage to a fembot classic, 1975’s The Stepford Wives, and its famous supermarket sequence. Iris (Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher), incongruously styled throughout as a mid-century doll with a miniature beehive hairdo, walks dreamily through an aisle pushing a shopping trolley. She locks eyes with Josh (a smarmy Jack Quaid), who charmingly upsets a display of oranges. It’s the cutest of meet cutes, and in voiceover Iris describes the blissful experience of finding meaning in her life the day she met him, surpassed only by the day she killed him.

Companion really gets going in its more sprightly and surprising second half.

For those annoyed at the poster and trailer revealing Iris’ bionic biology, cool your jets. The film doesn’t exactly keep it a secret, with the script throwing in observations about Iris being “built that way” and a “beautiful creation” from the beginning. She certainly feels like an outsider in the luxurious lakeside lodge where she and Josh have been invited by his friends for the weekend. It’s owned by seedy Russian sugar daddy Sergey, played by an enjoyably daft Rupert Friend with a perma-tan and mullet.

Where Companion really gets going is in its more sprightly and surprising second half. Pivoting away from the obvious reveal of Iris’ origins, the film becomes a noir-ish chase through the woods with $12 million cash at stake while Iris makes a bid for freedom from her captor. There’s some humour along the way, mostly via What We Do In The Shadows’ Harvey Guillén as Josh’s friend Eli, partnered with an endearing Lukas Gage as his himbo boyfriend.

Although at the outset it seems like writer/director Drew Hancock is aiming for his own entry in the recent wave of ‘patriarchy is evil’ dark comedies with a sci-fi bent, like Don’t Worry Darling or Blink Twice, it’s an odd relief that Companion isn’t really about anything more serious than realising your boyfriend is a controlling arsehole.