Companion is Drew Hancock’s feature directorial debut and much like his producer Zach Cregger who directed Barbarian for his debut feature, it is a delicious mix of genres that times its tone shifts perfectly. I’d categorize this as a thriller/comedy that takes place in a world eerily close enough to ours to be disconcerting. Here are the 4 things that stood out to me (no spoilers!).

Point 1: Fudge À La Mode

I know that sounds like an odd point, but follow me on this. Imagine a decadent, rich fudge square topped off with fluffy ice cream. Now if you just skim the ice cream off the top and eat that, well that will be delicious and light. If you scrape the ice cream off and eat the fudge alone, it will also be a great dessert if a bit rich. But if you cut through to get some fudge and ice cream together, now that’s a winning formula every bite. And that’s how I feel about Companion. You can watch it on a very surface level and find it quite entertaining. You could also watch it from a different perspective and see all the disturbing aspects that it’s covering and have a different experience altogether. 

However, Companion is best when it marries the two together and you take the dark with the entertaining. While one moment, you grapple with ethical conundrums (discussed more in point 2), the next you are laughing at a well-placed one-liner. On that note, there is one specific gnarly kill that is also very creative that I loved and will stay with me for a while. You’ll know it when you see it. 

It’s this perfectly juxtaposed interplay to me that raises Companion to a better product than the M3GAN type B-movie it could have easily been. Not to take anything away from M3GAN, which succeeds at what it was going for, but I don’t think anyone would accuse it of trying for more than the entertainment value. Companion is if you mixed Alex Garland’s Ex Machina with the tone of something like M3GAN or Ready or Not. That may not sound like it would work together, but it ends up being fudge à la mode. 

Point 2: Analogies

If we want to really dig into the fudge, this is decadent alright. As a fan of themes, this hit all the right buttons. Without revealing anything, this covers topics such as bodily autonomy, the ethical conundrums that come with conscious artificial intelligence, abusive relationships, the ability to take responsibility, and more. I won’t list everything for fear of spoilers, but I’ll at least touch on a couple.

I was pleasantly surprised at the handling of the topic of abusive relationships. Although the relationship in question is not between two humans, it still puts into perspective the role power imbalances play in regular relationships. It makes you think about those people in your lives that can’t seem to leave abusive relationships despite the red flags. It also empathizes with the victims in those situations rather than blaming them. It shows the side of how despite knowing everything that’s wrong, you are unable to let go because of the emotions you still have tied up with that person, and how abusive people use that against them.

The other theme that I think is a little bit more subtle because it gets hidden by the human vs AI aspect is how people who seem otherwise normal (not that anyone in this movie is all that normal!) can flip on a dime when in the presence of someone they do not deem as equal. In this movie, that may be an AI, but I think this is just as poignant for other forms of discrimination. The easiest parallel here is men with women but I think the comparison with racism or transphobia is easy to make as well. Companion doesn’t shy away from showing how easy it is for a regular person to just treat someone terribly because of their preconceived notions despite the other person being perfectly normal in front of you. Rather than judging someone for WHO they are, you judge them for WHAT they are. 

Overall, I really appreciated all the deeper undercurrents of important messages that were present in the film.

Point 3: LOL

Of course, if you just want the fudge, you can go watch Ex Machina. What sets Companion apart from that is the ice cream. Whether it’s a jump cut from a tense moment to something hilarious (taking cues from Barbarian there) or just replaying previously sweet moments for laughs, all of the comedy feels organic. If the writing delivers on the deeper themes, the editing and dialogue delivers on the comedy. In fact, I wrestled with calling this a comedy/thriller at first.

Not that 97 minutes is a long runtime at all, but I think it’s the comedy that keeps the pacing feel tight even with the 97 minutes. This could easily be an episode of Black Mirror in the way it ties the dark humour in with the dystopian feel. 

Another very key aspect of making the comedy hit, especially at the laugh out loud level it is at certain points, is the creative information drip. You are not told everything from the beginning and it’s all the better for it. In fact, you would probably have the best experience if you didn’t even know that this was a movie about an AI companion, but at some point you have to give some idea of what the movie is about. The film starts out with the character treating Iris (a play on Siri) as a normal person. But the movie has more than just Iris being an AI up its sleeve and those twists and reveals are just as instrumental in making the laughs pop. To me, that’s the best way to do comedy – weaving it into the fabric of the narrative.

Point 4: Sophie & Jack

In the end, you could write a great story, make it look good, but in a movie like this if Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid can’t play their deeper-than-what-it-seems roles well, it’s for naught. As Iris runs the gamut of emotions, Sophie Thatcher nails every expression. The camera often lingers closely on her face and the microexpressions drive home the subtle feelings that Iris is going through in every moment. From the vulnerable moments to the more ruthless ones, Thatcher takes her role from Heretic and outdoes it.

Jack Quaid on the other hand has to play the nice boyfriend who eventually turns to peel back the layers of the type of person who would get a companion robot in the first place. Quaid has already nailed the nice dorky guy role from The Boys but here, he gets to explore the more cynical side of the type of guy that calls himself a nice guy. You know the ones.  If you hate incels, you’ll like this one.

This January has been very unusual, dropping two excellent movies in Presence, which I also wrote about, and now Companion. In any year, I think both of these would end up ranking pretty high on my list of favourite movies. I can only hope that this signals a great rest of the year for movies. If you’re wondering what to watch in February, maybe take a look at my under the radar films to watch out for.