<em>Companion</em> Would Like Us to Think About the Nature of Love

I managed to go into Companion knowing nothing about it. The trailers made it look like exactly my kind of over-the-top, and I figured there was a speculative element. I’m delighted to report that it’s fun and dark and supremely messed up—and a perfect bitter antidote to Valentine’s Day if you need that.

And that’s almost all I’m going to report because I don’t want to spoil anything!

If you want to go in completely cold, which I would recommend: A young couple goes to a rich friend’s country house for a weekend. Darkly funny, violent hijinks ensue. Writer-director Drew Hancock gives us some interesting subversions and tangents, but also allows the story to play out without feeling cluttered. People actually act like people, and each new plot twist is given plenty of room to breathe; I always felt like I could trust the storyteller. The soundtrack is full of syrupy love songs that act as a perfect counterpoint to all the dark stuff. The cast are all fabulous. Sophie Thatcher has to walk a very specific tightrope as Iris and does it perfectly. Jack Quaid’s Josh gets a nice twisty character arc, and he looks like he’s having a blast. Harvey Guillén is delightful as Eli, and Lukas Gage (the best part of the underrated Dead Boy Detectives), gets a much more layered role here and knocks it out of the park. Megan Suri and Rupert Friend don’t get quite as much to do as Kat and Sergey, the trophy-girlfriend and rich Russian/possible mobster who are hosting the weekend, but they’re both excellent nonetheless. And I think Jaboukie Young-White should be in literally everything.

And from here I start spoiling, so get outta here until you’ve seen it!

Fine, if you want to know a little more: In a near-future America where robotics have progressed much further than they have in our reality, a couples’ weekend becomes a platform to muse on the nature of love, consciousness, and the deep streak of misogyny that lies just beneath the surface of many seemingly happy relationships between men and women.

I mean it now, get outta here!

OK, everyone else—I assume you’ve either seen it, don’t mind being spoiled, or for some reason are reading this even though you have no interest in this movie. Weird, but sure, welcome.  

And now I can say that I really appreciate how this film deals with the idea of fuckbots.

To be fair, in the world of Companion, the human-shaped companions that Empathix sells are meant to be seen as “emotional support robots”—but I get the sense that no one actually calls them that. As the story rolls along, it becomes increasingly clear that a lot of people enjoy treating them terribly, whether despite of or because of the fact that the robots aren’t booted up knowing they’re robots—they’re programmed to feel physical pain and emotion and, as far as they can tell, they have free will.

After all, they don’t know they’re being shut off whenever they’re inconvenient, or that the overwhelming love they feel for their partners has been programmed in by their creators back at the lab, and can be dialed up or down according to the whims of people who actually own them.

Where I think Companion does something really cool is that the film doesn’t just say that Iris is a sexbot. The movie doesn’t open with her being delivered to Josh in a human-sized box, or show us the Empathix factory assembly line, or any of the other obvious choices. Instead it opens on a great, and retroactively chilling “meet-cute”, one that could be in any romcom—of course it’s a banal situation where Josh does something embarrassing, putting himself in the position of hapless nerd in front of an impossibly pretty, cool girl, who finds his awkwardness charming instead of annoying. She chooses him because he’s awkward.

But it isn’t real. He chose this meeting from a drop-down menu, because this is how he wants to think of himself. Hapless, charming, quirky. Just waiting for the girl who will see him for who he is.

And Iris has never been allowed to make a choice in her life.

Rather than just a basic critique of toxic masculinity, I think the film (much like Thatcher’s earlier film Heretic) adds a lot more layers as it goes.

Kat manipulates the whole situation for a while, and is only too happy to use everyone and lie to everyone to get what she wants. Sergey is only too happy to take advantage of a robot who seems to believe it has free will, even though every indication is that the robot, who does not know it’s a robot, will take that really badly. Eli would rather keep Patrick for years past his model’s prime, and maybe even fall in love with a robot that he can shut down at any time, rather than do the possibly more difficult work of creating a relationship with another living human. Josh being awful is an obvious path, but Jack Quaid wrings every drop of sociopathy out of the character after he turns on Iris. It’s all too easy to see him doing this shit to a “real” woman—because Iris, as she tells him repeatedly, experiences emotions and pain and genuinely never suspected she was a robot. Knowing that, Josh dives all the way into gleeful exploitation and cruelty.

And of course, in the end, even after everything he’s put her through, Josh is right when he says Iris won’t shoot him. He’s too bound up in her synapses, whether those synapses are in human brain meat or in the wiring inside her torso. Against all logic, she lets him get the upper hand one last time because she believes in the love she had for him, and only acts, finally, in self-defense.

The film does a fabulous job of allowing its two robots to be true believers when it comes to love, while also repeatedly hammering home the reality that they can be switched off or reprogrammed at any moment. Iris cranks her intelligence up at one point, but she doesn’t also magically gain superstrength or telepathy or any other powers that would make her invulnerable. She is always, always, vulnerable.

Patrick is the one who gets to die for love, but only after he’s reprogrammed to love Josh instead of Eli, and further turned into a legit killing machine. What we know of Patrick shows us that he’d be horrified by all of that—but is that only a result of the programming Eli gave him in the first place? When he finally remembers Eli, it’s not because Iris hacks into his mainframe; she simply reminds him of a conversation he and Eli had earlier. Once he remembers it, it seems to disrupt the implanted memories of Josh; his response is to short circuit himself with a taser.

Whatever else this film does, all the fun twists and reveals, I respect the hell out of it for letting a fuckbot die for love.

Here’s my dream: The youth pair this with The Substance or maybe Thatcher’s own Heretic for the sleepover double features of tomorrow. That this kind of fun-but-also-thoughtful speculative filmmaking can be the norm, and make money at the box office, and maybe occasionally win an award or two, and gently poke at people’s assumptions while remaining entertaining as hell.

What I love is when works of art do things they don’t really have to do. This could have been a simple story about a woman who finds out she’s a robot that’s been subject to a man’s whims, gets control of herself, cranks her intelligence and strength up, and wreaks vengeance. She could have paired up with the other robot to Kill All Humans. It could have been a shallow story about toxic masculinity. Instead, Companion takes its characters seriously. It lets Eli give a heartfelt declaration of love to Patrick—because who even knows what love really is? Why can’t Eli love a robot? Who says Patrick can’t love him back? If Patrick and Iris both feel love for their partners, who is anyone else to say that they’re wrong—to dictate what emotions are, or to say that theirs don’t count? From everything we see in Companion, when presented with the truth about their natures, Iris and Patrick both make their own decisions the same as any human would. Patrick chooses death rather than a life without Eli; Iris, after admitting to herself that Josh is inextricably bound into her mind, chooses to kill him and chart her own path.

Companion isn’t interested in passing judgment on its robots, or telling them what they “really” are—it’s much more interested in asking us what we think we are.