In the fall of 2017 I worked at a media startup that covered the tech world. Having attended many tech conferences in that span of time, the panel that retains all these years later is one where I saw a dumpy old man in a lab coat give a PowerPoint presentation on the potential societal benefits of sex robots. Besides opportunistically saying that these inventions would have the potential to stop violent men like Harvey Weinstein (this was in the heat of MeToo), there was the highlight of him noting that he initially felt the inspiration to try inventing robots for men to have sex with in light of the grief inflicted on the world by 9/11.
I guess I’ve already spoiled the set-up of Companion in this opening paragraph. Still, I felt it was an appropriate introduction for a sexbot movie that suffers from the pall of sociopolitical pressures, if those sociopolitical pressures are overly literalizing themes for the kids too busy looking at their phones to register visual storytelling. But the film, being sold as a horror movie, is really more a long episode of The Twilight Zone with some flashes of gore thrown in for good measure.
The eye-rolling smugness begins with Iris (Sophie Thatcher) recalling her romantic comedy-spoofing meet-cute with Josh (Jack Quaid). The couple heading to a weekend getaway at some rich asshole’s place, Iris feels minor anxiety over fitting in with Josh’s friend group. Sergey (Rupert Friend), the rich asshole hosting the event, ends up being even worse than expected, and in a fit of self-defense while he attempts to force himself on her, Iris kills him.
Yet in a twist revealed by the end of the first act, it turns out this was an orchestrated act on Josh’s end––Iris is actually a robot assigned to be both his girlfriend and essentially a glorified blow-up doll. Josh programmed her setting to a point where she could kill Sergey and he and the others could make off with his money. From there, Iris’ self-realization and subsequent self-actualization play out against a group of despicable characters trying to cover their tracks against a botched criminal operation.
Competently aping David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh’s cold, formally precise styles, director Drew Hancock’s mise-en-scène successfully conveys the antiseptic near-future we’re probably already living in, but can’t seem to work around the stakes and thrills being relatively low. To be more specific about the tension of Companion: it isn’t stupid, dull, or badly made per se, but it’s unlikeable, and awfully smug for something not that high on insight or genuine surprise. The multiple instances of Josh spelling out his modern male psychology of entitlement and abandonment issues point to the fact that basically no January New Line Cinema genre movie can just be termite art anymore.
In fact, it’s even surprising to see the New Line Cinema logo before the film––Companion is so emblematic of contemporary “content” that it overwhelmingly suggests a modern streaming movie. It would be hard to justify purchasing a ticket for a movie that you can get the complete gist of from reading this review.
Companion opens on Friday, January 24.