Movie Review : Companion (2025)
I don’t know much about artificial intelligence. It just sort of showed up one day, like Uber, or vaping, or my sudden inability to remember anyone’s phone number. I’m not convinced it’s good or bad yet (if our track record with technology means anything, it’s probably catastrophic), but it’s inevitable. Anything that promises massive profits tends to materialize faster than a hateful person in a comments section.
We’ve been making movies about robots and AI for decades, way before ChatGPT entered the group chat. But Companion arrives now and feels like the first smart movie of the AI era.
Or is it?
That’s trickier than it sounds. Companion is entertaining, sure. It’s clever in parts. But it doesn’t have much to say about artificial intelligence. Not really.
Companion tells the story of Josh (Jack Quaid), a man who has forsaken the idea of having a girlfriend and purchased an expensive customizable robot companion named Iris (Sophie Thatcher) instead. As they travel to a cabin in the woods in order to spend the weekend with friends, Iris is sexually assaulted by another uh, atypical significant other named Sergey (played by the always awesome Rupert Friend), who she promptly murders even if she’s programmed to not hurt anyone.
Our Robot Underdogs
Here’s the thing: the science fiction in Companion feels mostly cosmetic. You couldn’t tell this exact story if Iris were human, but you could get about 97% of the way there. At its core, Companion is a morality play about a man using what he sees as an emotional appliance to commit murder. Josh doesn’t view Iris as a person, but that’s the default setting for narcissists. He bought her because he wanted someone he didn’t have to consider.
So yes, Companion is partly about Iris’s slow odyssey toward self-determination. And yes, it’s also a twisty crime caper that gets ridiculous (in a fun way). But the film never really questions Iris’s humanity. It assumes it. She's framed as an underdog from the jump, less Westworld existentialism, more "woman fights for survival in a misogynistic and privileged hellscape."
Her story isn't about "becoming human." It’s about not getting crushed. She becomes her own master because survival demands it, not because of some grand philosophical awakening.
That’s the real story: not robots versus humans.
Just good versus evil.
And the robots, like the humans, are exactly what we make them. Iris isn’t "good" or "bad." She’s just optimized to survive.
Russian Gold and Red Flags
I’m complaining a lot here because the AI premise in Companion feels like window dressing. But you know what? The movie works. Josh and his friends are a cesspool of privilege and emotional rot, but they’re also painfully relatable. They’re those mid-20s kids who drink too much at cabins and reminisce about high school because they have no better ideas for what they should do. They want simple solutions for problems that don’t have simple answers.
Enter Sergey: the outsider. The wild card. The man who’s somehow more awful than the rest of them, but also the only character who really tests anyone's moral backbone. Sergey isn’t an unstoppable villain. He’s just a rich, reckless idiot, a guy whose wealth lets him indulge every terrible impulse. Honestly, it’s kind of surprising he didn’t buy his own robot girlfriend. Maybe he wanted the "thrill" of ruining someone else's.
*
I enjoyed Companion for what it was: a Friday night movie you watch with a glass of wine, mildly buzzed, and go to bed afterward feeling vaguely entertained. Not worried about robot uprisings. Not grappling with existential dread. Because Companion’s quiet argument is that robots aren’t the real danger.
Not unless there's money involved.
Not unless someone sees a profit in chaos.
Otherwise, they’ll just keep doing what we built them to do.
Which, apparently, is fucking.
7.1/10
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