Review by C.J. Bunce
When was the last time a movie actually delivered for you? If you haven’t scene a satisfying science fiction movie in a long while, you’re going to want to watch Companion, now streaming on Max. It has everything you want in a cautionary robot/android/cyborg tale like M3GAN, Ex Machina, or The Stepford Wives, and it’s a much better turn than the automaton thriller Five Nights at Freddy’s. The “Mod” cyborg actress from Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, Sophie Thatcher, stars as Iris, the star robot of the story, and she brings the humanity along, those vibes that made the borgs of the British Humans series and the Synths of the Alien tie-ins so compelling. Star Trek: Lower Decks star Jack Quaid is her desperate boyfriend/owner Josh.
Get ready for your next Sci-fi Fix.
How are often do you find your favorite science fiction stories are derived from classic short stories from the 1950s? This story isn’t big or epic–low-side on the budget, not many special effects–and it doesn’t need to be. The entire cast is basically Thatcher, Quaid, and Megan Suri (Bones) as Kat, an old friend of Josh who is dating a wealthy Russian man named Sergey who lives as far from society as you can get. He’s played by Rupert Friend (Asteroid City). Josh takes Iris for a vacation with Kat at Sergey’s retreat, also attended by friend Eli, played by What We Do In the Shadows’ Harvey Guillén, and his boyfriend Patrick The White Lotus’s Lukas Gage.
The rest of the movie is all about tight writing and direction by writer-director Drew Hancock (Suburgatory). The plot is similar in ways to story beats in Ex Machina (reviewed here), the creepy thriller that starred Alicia Vikander as a humanoid robot, who finds that her creator and another man think they are smarter than her. But this genre-bender isn’t about someone creating the perfect girlfriend. It’s also not the drama of the AMC series Humans, but a mystery with some good horror elements from The Stepford Wives school of storytelling. And yet it’s not a knockoff of either. It is a closed room heist movie–and more. And even if you know already what the movie is about, the direction plays with the audience in a good way–when will Iris learn what is going on? The same time we do?
The age-old robot science fiction question is pushed and pulled at once again: What does it mean to be human? Technically Iris is not a cyborg–the word robot is just thrown around more as an afterthought than a definitive analysis. And yet the movie asks all the questions of a great borg story. How did they make the humanoid robots in the movie? We just don’t know. Iris is less human than Thatcher’s “Mod” from her stint in the Star Wars universe.
Hancock packages the movie with some exquisite splices of pop songs, including the BeeGees’ “Emotion,” The Turtles’ “You Showed Me,” “Lil Boo Thang” by Paul Russell, and even the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass classic “This Guy’s in Love with You.”
Science fiction. Horror movie. Revenge thriller. Action heist movie. Mystery. All in one. Companion arrived in theaters January 31, 2025, so it’s streaming as a fairly current release. Don’t miss the next great sci-fi fix. One of the best films of the year, Companion is streaming now on Max.
