There are two ways to go into Companion: knowing none of what it’s about or knowing some of what it’s about. (You’ll never know all of what it’s about, until you watch the movie.) If you know nothing, there will be some great surprises in store for you. But if you know some of what it’s about, you’ll get more out of the expertly crafted moments leading up to what qualifies as a reveal to the first crowd. This is going to be a “some of what it’s about” type of review, but then again, it’s nothing you won’t have already learned if you have even a cursory familiarity with the film’s ad campaign.

In and of itself, writer-director Drew Hancock‘s film is not the sort that places a huge value on plot developments that occur later, sometimes very much later, in the narrative. Even in the cold open – a meet cute between Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) involving a grocery store and a whole mess of spilt oranges – we learn information about the fate of one of these characters, if the person giving the voiceover can be considered a reliable narrator. That, though, would be the central question in any film where a main character is – last spoiler warning – an artificial intelligence.

But let’s put ourselves back in the shoes of the “knowing nothing” audience for a moment. Following the meet cute that’s so cute it seems like it was programmed – har har – we see Josh and Iris, after several months of dating, on a ride down a twisty lane deep into the woods. Josh’s car is driving, our first indication we might be in the future (or maybe not, actually). They’re approaching the little rustic cabin where four other friends are waiting – they’re played by Megan Suri, Lukas Gage, Harvey Guillen and Rupert Friend – though Josh takes issue with that description when a mansion comes into view, nearly 30K from the last building they passed.

Iris has a last-minute freakout whether Josh’s friends will like her more than they have in the past. While that sort of paranoia is usually self-inflicted and exaggerated, Iris has reasons to be worried, as Josh’s friends greet her with a mixture of befuddlement and awkward welcoming. The sense of “other” in this apparently confident young woman is palpable, because she is. Soon enough, we realise that turns of phrase we’ve incorporated into our vernacular – such as “that’s a lot to process” – may have a whole different meaning with Iris. And Iris might be the only one in the house who doesn’t know about any of it.

That’s where we reach the outer limits of “knowing some of what it’s about.” Because knowing the rest is a journey replete with laughs, gasps, great narrative reconfigurations that spring directly from clues planted earlier in the script, and perhaps most surprisingly, a decent quantity of moving sentiment about love and self-actualisation.

Companion would seem to have the disadvantage of coming along at a time when the thriller conceit du jour involves an AI blurring the lines between human and machine. However, if God is in the details, then the exquisite joy of Companion is in the nature of this blurring. Iris has quite the series of hard truths in front of her, not least of which that she’s not flesh and blood like the other people in the “cabin,” but also that she can’t lie to Josh, and that the physical intimacy she thought she was offering freely is just programming.

However, Iris also realises some very clever ways she can use the limitations of her reality to her benefit – adjusting settings, that sort of thing. The way Hancock reveals these to us is consistently a pleasure, especially since each obeys a rule that was set up earlier in the script. That these should be necessary should also come as no surprise, since it wouldn’t be a movie if Iris were not going to fall at cross purposes to the others under this roof.

The twisted humour, the shocking turns of events, the organic cleverness of the dialogue … it all makes Companion an incredibly fun time from moment to moment. The emotional depth of the subject matter is what creeps up on you. Iris’ status as essentially a glorified sex robot – a sex robot who can give you the weather forecast whenever you want – belies the sense of personhood she has always felt belonged to her, because she was programmed to believe she was just the same as any other person. Her memories are real, even if they never really happened, and it almost feels more cruel to have made her this way, an apparently consensual creature, just because a sense of her having choice adds dimension to the fantasy for Josh and others like him.

There’s some touchy feely stuff here about love – to reveal more about the best scene in that regard would be to reveal other spoilers – but there’s also, obviously, a thematic interest in abusive relationships. Specifically, to keep a sex robot in a state of ignorance about her own nature is pretty deep into the ways boyfriends and girlfriends gaslight each other, and the dimensions of that gaslighting only reveal themselves further as the script goes along.

Companion is a series of these expert reveals, expertly shot and edited, the kind that make us wonder where Drew Hancock has been all our lives. The answer is that he’s been writing and directing short films and TV episodes for 20 years, though not doing any of either for the past seven. If he needed a seven-year running start to bring Companion to the screen, then it was time well spent, and we should be eager for significantly less downtime before he follows with his next.

 

Companion is currently playing in cinemas.