New & now: Companion

Drew Hancock's timely dark comedy-thriller is cynical, chilling & sad all at once.

Ah, true(?) love(?)

(Contains spoilers)

Do you folks remember HitchBot? I do, it’s one of those things that I occasionally think about, for no discernible reason other than my brain decides it’s a good time to ponder the bleak state of humanity. HitchBot, the creation of a Canadian robotics team, was a robot designed to answer the question “Can robots trust humans?” Though it couldn’t move on its own, HitchBot could talk, and it asked people to give it rides, in a test to see how far it could get.

Designed to look something like a scrap metal soda can with arms and legs, HitchBot looked harmless, even cute, and the response in its native Canada was very positive. It made it all the way from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, as fans all across the country tracked its progress online. HitchBot’s design team decided to try to repeat the experiment in the U.S. It worked for about two weeks, until, in Philadelphia, Hitchbot was destroyed.

I found myself strangely bothered by not just HitchBot’s destruction, but the gleefulness people took in it. People seemed to think it was hilarious that an object that looked like something a child put together (and ironically was supposed to encourage trust and goodwill) was smashed beyond repair. To me, it didn’t seem all that different from bullies destroying a lemonade stand, but clearly, because HitchBot was a robot and didn’t have feelings, it was okay. It was just an object, after all, and it’s okay to break an object every now and then, as a little treat.

I don’t know if Drew Hancock had HitchBot in mind when he wrote and directed Companion, but I sure did, and that made watching it an even more chilling experience. The gleeful malevolence in the individuals who destroyed HitchBot is present in the antagonist, and is plausibly in many people you might know, made all the more dangerous because of how much they feel they’re entitled to it.

It opens with the impossibly meet cute of Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid), the rare couple (these days, at least) who connect organically in real life, rather than online or via a dating app. They’re an attractive couple, the kind who gaze at each other like they can’t believe their luck. Iris and Josh are on their way to spend the weekend at a luxurious (and very remote) cabin with Josh’s friends, the idea of which makes Iris a little uneasy. The friends, Kat (Megan Suri) and her Russian sugar daddy Sergey (Rupert Friend), and Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage), treat Iris with polite (at best) distance, and she’s worried about how things will go.

As it turns out, there’s a reason for their chilly reception. If you’ve seen the trailers for Companion, you might be perplexed that it seemingly gives away an important aspect of the plot. It does, sort of, but only because that’s not actually the main twist. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Companion (or you missed that part), well, I’m about to spoil it for you: Iris is a humanoid robot, custom-designed to be Josh’s dream girlfriend.

In retrospect, even without the trailer giving it away, there are hints. There’s something a little unnatural about Iris, from her unblinking devotion to Josh, to her implausible lack of confidence and her cute but oddly old-fashioned clothes. She looks and acts like the ideal girlfriend: pretty (but not intimidatingly beautiful), modest, passive, and worrying about little else but making her partner happy.

The weekend seems to be going okay initially, until Iris’s programming is interfered with, and she violently attacks another member of the group. This is all part of a bigger scheme, however, one that doesn’t go as smoothly as planned after Iris learns that she’s not human.

On its most simple merits, Companion is a funny and exciting thriller, and a most assured debut from Hancock. Where it really shines, however, is in its thoughtful and often chilling details, which reflect certain unsettling realities. We learn throughout the film that every single aspect of Iris’s appearance and personality is customizable, including her eye color, intelligence, and the tone and pitch of her voice. If you’re a woman on the internet, then you’ll know that a lot of men have very strong opinions on our voices, and whether or not they’re too high, too low, too shrill, or too fried. Undoubtedly many of those men have fantasized about being able to turn our voices up, or down, or off completely, just with the touch of an app.

So too is the fact that Josh has set Iris’s intelligence at 40%, smart enough to reasonably hold a conversation but not as smart as him (or smarter, god forbid). She also doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor (inasmuch as being funny on her own as opposed to merely laughing at Josh’s jokes), and her open, almost childlike adoration for Josh makes it all the easier for him to control her.

Nothing about their relationship is “real,” not even how they met. It’s how Josh wants Iris to perceive him, as the deeply charming lead in their own corny romcom, without having to actually make the effort to be charming. The only thing that’s real is the love Iris feels for Josh, or rather, what she’s been programmed to feel, but it feels real to her, as is her heartbreak when she learns the truth.

It makes the smirking, gleeful disgust Josh expresses as he tells her what she really is all the more cruel. He’s enjoying watching her fall apart, in the same way I imagine the people who destroyed HitchBot (and were never caught) enjoyed what they did. It’s not real, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to have this conversation a lot in the future, both with the rise of A.I. and technology similar to Iris. What does it say about us as people when the appeal of a robot companion is that we can abuse them if we like? Incels often think they’re threatening women by mentioning that soon they’ll be rendered obsolete by life-like fuckbots, but what is it they’re eager to replace? Agency? Reciprocation? The ability to say no? I don’t know why I’m asking this like we don’t all know the answer.

Like other man-children who spend a lot of money on something only to willfully destroy it (heyyyyy waitaminute…), Josh resents Iris’s existence. It’s not his fault, after all, that he has to resort to a robot for female companionship, it’s the real women who refuse to acknowledge what a great guy he is. Even when he has the means to afford a pretty spectacular miracle of technology, he’s not satisfied. Now he’s mad he ever had to do it in the first place. This whole scheme that hinges on using Iris as an inadvertent assassin comes from his pernicious belief that he’s gotten a raw deal in life and constantly deserves more.

Even when things look like they might be going his way (for a little while at least), Josh can’t just take his win and walk away. It’s not enough to just leave Iris to take the fall for his (frankly not very well thought out) plan, he has to get sadistic pleasure out of telling her that what they had together wasn’t real, that she’s not real. That vindictive streak will prove to be his downfall in the end, which is very satisfying, but it makes Josh so far one of the year’s most memorable villains, largely because of how believable he is. Vindictiveness is how we got to where we are as a country, and Companion illustrates that with marvelous skill.