Com­pan­ion review – no thrills, only spills in this AI apologia

Ever since man invent­ed robots, he’s been look­ing for ways to have sex with them. Pop cul­ture reflects the infat­u­a­tion: The Step­ford Wives, Her, Ex Machi­na, Blade Run­ner 2049 – and now Com­pan­ion, from writer/​director Drew Han­cock. It’s a giv­en in Hol­ly­wood: if there’s a female robot in a film, she will be beau­ti­ful, and a man will want to fuck her. Iris (Sophie Thatch­er) is the suit­ably pret­ty, meek robot girl­friend of Josh (Jack Quaid), designed to adore him end­less­ly and bliss­ful­ly unaware of her lack of autonomy.

Yet Iris is at least aware that Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri) dis­likes her, mak­ing her ner­vous about the prospect of a week­end at her boyfriend Sergey’s (Rupert Friend) idyl­lic lake house. Her ever-reas­sur­ing boyfriend negates Iris’ reser­va­tions, and soon they’re hang­ing out with Kat, Sergey, and anoth­er cou­ple, Patrick (Lukas Gage) and Eli (Har­vey Guil­lén). Every­thing seems per­fect – until Sergey winds up dead, and Iris is con­front­ed with some shock­ing rev­e­la­tions about her seem­ing­ly per­fect life.

A game of cat and mouse unfurls as Iris attempts to out­smart her Nice Guy boyfriend and his bud­dies, using her new­found under­stand­ing of her robot capa­bil­i­ties to her advan­tage. Yet there’s some­thing cloy­ing about the film using a vul­ner­a­ble young woman to extol that AI might be deserv­ing of human rights. Used and abused by her dread­ful boyfriend, there’s no ques­tion the audi­ence is encour­aged to root for Iris and feel sym­pa­thet­ic to her plight. But the fact remains that she is a robot. At a time when the tech indus­try is con­tin­u­al­ly attempt­ing to force AI down our throats, there’s some­thing cloy­ing about a film so naked­ly insis­tent that a robot can replace a human being it por­trays almost all the humans in the sto­ry as self-serv­ing and villainous.

This is hard­ly nov­el; the robot seek­ing eman­ci­pa­tion from the cru­el­ty of human­i­ty is a trope that pops up across film his­to­ry, fair­ly recent­ly in Spike Jonze’s Her, Alex Garland’s Ex Machi­na and even Robert Rodriguez’s Ali­ta: Bat­tle Angel. Com­pan­ion cracks a few jokes about robot fuck­ing and ges­tures towards the very real threat of the patri­archy against women, but the film’s cliché premise does lit­tle to help dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from any oth­er robot sym­pa­this­ing thriller. The more inter­est­ing points hint­ed at – such as the pow­er dynam­ics in Patrick and Eli’s rela­tion­ship – are quick­ly for­got­ten in favour of a staid, famil­iar for­mat that is ulti­mate­ly as robot­ic as its protagonist.