Drew Hancock finds a ‘Companion’

Cinema | February 10th, 2025

By Greg Carlson

To write with any degree of detail about filmmaker Drew Hancock’s “Companion” requires a spoiler alert. So if you have not seen the movie and hope to wring maximum enjoyment from the experience, I would strongly recommend that you stop reading and buy a ticket to the next available showing. With its diabolical, pitch-perfect marketing campaign to whet the appetite for what looks like artsy A24 or Neon-styled head games (the movie belongs to Warner under New Line Cinema), “Companion” works on nearly every level. The tongue-in-cheek reference in the trailer to “The Notebook” contrasts rather pointedly with the image of lead Sophie Thatcher’s arm on fire at a dinner table.

The authenticity of Thatcher’s outstanding recent performance in “Heretic” — she was raised in the Mormon faith but has left the church — will draw admirers of the 2024 release to the new movie. With a growing, horror-heavy filmography, Thatcher has been tagged as an emerging “scream queen,” but her chops are sharp enough to transcend the genre tag. In “Companion,” she plays Iris, introduced with an awkwardly adorable meet-cute flashback in a grocery store as the nervous girlfriend of Jack Quaid’s Josh. En route to a secluded lake cabin presumably owned by a wealthy Russian (played with gleeful, mustachioed sleaze by Rupert Friend), Hancock sets the table with economic exposition; we come to understand why Iris worries so much about what Josh’s friends think of her.

A whole bunch of revelations follow in rapid succession. Iris is, of course, the companion of the title — a sophisticated, app-controlled simulacrum purchased by Josh for a domestic partnership that includes uninhibited sex on demand. Unaware of her android status until a wicked twist awakens a conscience, Iris is the next-gen mashup of Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives” and the replicants (especially Pris and Roy) of “Blade Runner.” At its most engrossing, the movie’s spin on consent and agency in the incel-saturated climate of “tradwife” misogyny and fascism embraced by the current occupiers of the White House opens the door to multiple layers of juicy subtext.

In terms of plot mechanics, “Companion” sticks close to the chapters in the horror playbook that describe escalating body counts. Hancock carefully metes out the ultra-violence. One roadside beatdown, which immediately follows what could be Thatcher’s funniest bit in the whole movie, is a stomach-turning masterclass in blunt force trauma. The director also swaps Chekhov’s gun for an electric corkscrew, which may or may not be a sly comment on the dangers of too much technology. Regardless, the AI discourse is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Hancock’s movie, better with multiple viewings, may not be the most intellectually inclined of the emerging class, but it is well-programmed for entertainment.

Kogonada’s 2021 “After Yang” set the bar for cinematic stories about the ethics of “techno sapien” servitude. Last year, S.K. Dale directed “Subservience,” a science fiction-infused thriller that considers themes of sentience emerging from interactions between humans and eroticized, hyper-realistic constructions. But it was another 2024 movie, Scooter McCrae’s controversial and divisive “Black Eyed Susan,” that reached into the darkest heart of rape culture. Overall, the reviews for McCrae’s low budget provocation revealed a wide range of opinion on the movie’s relative success or failure, but it might be the most thought-provoking companion to “Companion.”

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