’Tis the season for rom-coms! “Companion” (2025) ...er, um,...let's see about that

….but it does start out like one. Here’s spoiler-free description but I promise some spoilers are coming later. I’ll use a big space and hash-tags and fair warning when we get there.

Josh and Iris are two twenty-somethings going away for a weekend with Josh’s friends at a lakeside “cabin”, so Josh’s friend Sergey calls it; call it what it is, a big house. We’ve seen in flashback Josh and Iris’s meet-cute, we know that Iris is insecure around his friends and is convinced that his pal, Sergey’s girlfriend Kat, hates her.

In addition to Sergey and Kat, there’s also Eli and Patrick and while everyone is decent to Iris, Kat does make her antipathy known. Will Iris win Kat over? Will hijinks among the couples ensue? Will there be a major conflict, break-up, and get back together series with Josh and Iris?

Well, of course, silly!!!

Iris has a secret, though, and so for that matter, does everyone! It’s a fun romp chockfull of laughter, romance, and sexy time! 

And lots of bodies and blood and death and double-crosses, and sexual assault. 

Drew Hancock has done a fine job of working the dark comedy circuit and to be sure, it’s not a deep film looking into the nuances of love and relationships, but it does have some wry wit, clever dispatches of people who deserve it, and all around strong performances by the cast, particularly Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid. Rupert Friend as Sergey manages to pull off threatening and being a hoot at the same time, Lucas Gage as Patrick is a guileless charmer, in turns a bit different from Smile 2, Euphoria and White Lotus. The always reliable Harvey Guillén as Eli projects warmth, a gentle wit, and a bit of neediness in just the right amount and Megan Suri, who’s done some killer work in a number of series, plays Kat with a nice balance of grit, suspicion, and coolness, not just toward Iris, but toward Sergey, as well (spoiler! He has a wife! And it’s not Kat!)

You can probably guess that something’s up by the time Iris goes down to the lakeside and is cajoled by Sergey to stay. I won’t say too much more, but let’s leave it that this is the turning point in the film and it’s difficult to discuss much of the various conflicts and resolutions without getting more spoilery.

So here we go! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

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Okay, if you’re still reading this, it’s all on you.

Iris is a robot. She’s manufactured by a company called Empathic and we learn later that it’s mostly lonely losers like Jack who buy these ‘bots. To Quaid’s credit, he plays the nice, sweet, vulnerable boyfriend really well; and he plays the grande douchebag even better; whiney, needy, stupid but thinks he’s way cleverer, and narcissistic. He’s a gas to watch, as is Sophie Thatcher has something of that Anya Taylor-Joy otherworldliness about her. 

Of course, she’s set up to kill Sergey as part of a plan cooked up by Kat and Jack to steal millions from their host. Jack jailbreaks Iris and modifies her so that she can actually harm humans (somewhere Asimov is probably gritting his teeth as his lips curl in a taut grin) and once Sergey is dead, Jack turns her off and when she comes to, she’s tied to a chair, and Jack reveals all. 

It’s a genuinely effective reveal as Thatcher goes through confusion and denial and eventually escapes when Kat and Jack begin arguing about why he is still talking to Iris. To him, it didn’t feel right that she would be deactivated before knowing the truth about who and what she was. Once she does escape, the bodies start piling up between Iris, Jack, and Patrick. 

Oh, yeah. Patrick is also a robot and was “love-linked” to Eli as Iris was to Jack. When a bot is activated, implanted memories are launched, and they come to life with smiles and a warm “hey, you.” Eli is much nicer than Jack and the meet-cute for Patrick and him is pretty adorable. A more qualitative difference between the two couples is that Patrick had figured out that he was a robot and Eli genuinely feels affection for Patrick. 

However, both are enlisted by Jack and Kat to hunt down Iris and kill her. Empathic has been called with a cock and bull story about how Iris just went rogue and killed Sergey. Iris is also controlled by Jack’s phone, which she now has and has upped her intelligence from 40% (“Really, Jack?” might be one of the best line readings in the whole film) and begins to plan her flight. She’s covered in Sergey’s blood, so making it to the highway and hitchhiking isn’t an option. She decides to take her chances heading back to Sergey’s to grab Jack’s car and head home. 

She is waylaid by Eli and Patrick in the woods and Eli winds up dead when the gun he’s holding goes off. Patrick is traumatized and while Kat and Jack are running in the direction of the shot, Iris gets back to the house, gets in Jack’s car, and takes vocal control of the car by modulating her voice to sound like Jack’s the whole time he’s trying to break in and get her. Eventually, she gets going and Jack gets hold of Eli’s phone, reports his car stolen, and reboots Patrick to send him after Iris. Interestingly, there’s an “Agression” setting which Jack turns up to a hundred percent.

The car shuts down on the side of the road as it’s been reported stolen and a state cop comes up behind Iris as she’s finally broken her way out. She switches her language to German because she can’t lie and the cop is clueless about what she’s saying until she mentions Sergey and he laughs and figures she’s part of some goings-on at the lake house. The cop sees the bloody knife that Iris used on Sergey and before he can do anything, Patrick, appearing from out of the woods behind the officer, finishes him and subdues Iris. 

Once back at the house, Jack realizes that he’s going to have to alter his story for Empathic, but Kat is having none of it and prepares to take her cut and leave. Unfortunately, when Jack orders Patrick to stop her, it’s pretty much a full stop with a steak knife. We’r now four bodies in, and when Iris comes to, she’s handcuffed to a chair at the dinner table with Jack being less than loving toward her. He dials her intelligence down to zero and sets her right arm on fire, all the while sounding like the intel he is without an ounce of self-reflection. If there was a sense of genuine gratitude in Eli’s dialog with Patrick, you get the idea that might have been lacking in Jack and Iris’s relationship.

Eventually, two representatives from Empathic show up to take Iris away. By this point, Jack has ordered her to shoot herself the head, but it turns out that the hard drives that store all a companion’s data resides in the stomach area. Patrick stands off to the side in the dead police officer’s uniform as Jack explains the situation the two reps. As they’re walking out, the senior rep (one of my favorite comedians, Matt McCarty) explains to the newer guy Mateso (Woody Fu) that Jack probably did set the whole thing up and they’ll find out when they get Iris back to the plant. Before they can go too far, Patrick shows up in front of them and kills McCarty. Iris in the meantime has rebooted and recharged and takes off while Patrick chases after Mateo and eventually begins choking him out by a tree. Iris save the rep from Patrick by explaining that he was in love with Eli, that his memory has been manipulated by Jack, and as his “true” memories return, we see a stunned Patrick decommission himself by thrusting an electric cattle prod in his mouth 

When Iris returns to confront and kill Jack, she’s a new bot. Mateo has freed her from the controls on Jack’s phone and she reads him the riot act; she calls him out on his pettiness, his persistent victimhood, and yes, his smaller than average penis. Iris can’t quite find it in herself to pull the trigger and Jack assaults her, claiming that he’s all of her. When he finally gets on top of her to blow out her hard drive, he tells her to admit as much and before he pulls the trigger, Iris tells him to “go to sleep”, the instructions for powering down a companion bot as she plunges an electric corkscrew into his temple (nicely played, by the way). The next day, Iris has a duffle bag filled with money, hits the highway in Sergey’s spiffy car, and waves with her flesh-free right hand to a woman in the car next to her, who may or may not be a companion herself.

Altogether, this is Ex Machina Lite. That’s not a slight; I genuinely enjoyed what Hancock’s done here, even if some of the themes he’s taken on don’t quite get the fuller exploration they deserve. It’s difficult not to see the larger issues of toxic masculinity and privilege’s exploitive nature as front and center, and while I appreciate that Iris did find her agency, there’s a sense that this could have used more time to go into. Similarly with Patrick and Eli, the contrast between the two couples could have been drawn out just a bit more, as well. 

Additionally, Kat gets some interesting moments. She is, as just about everyone in the film, way smarter than Jack and it turns out that it’s not Iris she doesn’t like, “it’s the idea of [her]”; Iris doesn’t understand because at that point, she doesn’t know she’s a companion. Still, there’s some fun world-building that could come out of this. I’m not sure it really warrants a sequel, but I like Iris; Thatcher has a winning presence and a sly knowingness, now that she’s a hundred percent.

That wave at the woman in the car at the end was also telling; if the woman was a companion, consider it a kind of foreshadowing for what might await that couple; it it’s a biological woman, then what it says about relationships is similarly loaded. Next up for Valentine’s Day: Love Hurts.