Review of Companion, directed by Drew Hancock

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

Now I have a confession to make: horror movies typically aren’t my jam. They’re something I often find is outside of my comfort zone, and it’s not because I get scared easily. I rarely get scared or finding myself jumping in my seat. I think it’s just really hard to do one well, that’s all.

I did end up watching Companion on a flight back from Portugal because I was really bored and I had seen most of the movies on TAP’s arsenal already. The downside to being a movie person is that when you go on flights and expect something new, you’ve probably seen the majority of what’s available.

But I hadn’t seen Companion, so that was my choice of the day! Let’s get into the review.

When a robot realizes that she’s not actually someone’s girlfriend and indeed a robot, it leads to a series of events where he and his friends hunt her down.

This movie opens where the two main characters, Iris and Josh, meet for the first time. They’re grocery shopping during their somewhat awkward first encounter, but it’s like sparks fly for the first time. Some time passes and now they’re going on vacation with Josh’s friends: Kat, Eli, Patrick, and Sergey.

When Sergey, the owner of the house and allegedly a mobster, tries to sexually assault Iris while they’re alone by the water, Iris ends up killing him with a knife. Covered in blood, she returns to the house, and Josh, freaked out by what he’s seeing, tells her to go to sleep.

It’s from that point on that we learn Iris is actually a robot Josh purchased to keep himself company. When she wakes up, he tells her that, as she did not have a consciousness on that fact before this moment. She ends up breaking free while he’s talking to Kat and runs out into the woods with his phone, where she discovers she can bump her own intelligence levels.

She sets it to 100% from that point on, and back at the house Josh confesses he ended up removing a software aspect where it prevents Iris from harming others. He also planned with Kat Sergey’s murder so they could steal his wealth. He asks Eli and Patrick if they want to join in the plan, although Patrick is actually a robot himself.

Eli grabs a gun from Sergey’s stash and the group decides to hunt down Iris. It’s in the woods Patrick and Eli have a loving moment, where Patrick confesses that he knows he’s a robot, but he has a genuine love for Eli. But when they come across Iris, she ends up killing Eli, leaving Patrick despondent and devastated.

Iris breaks into Josh’s smart car, but he uses Sergey’s phone to report the car as stolen. Because it’s a self-driving ar, it locks her inside, where she’s found by a police officer. However, Josh reprogrammed Patrick to be his companion, pushes his aggression levels to the max, and tells him to find Iris.

Patrick stumbles upon Iris and the cop on the road. He kills the officer and throws Iris in the trunk with the body, and Kat, upon seeing what’s happening, reveals that Sergey was never a mob boss. As she tries to flee the situation, Josh tells Patrick to stop her, and he kills Kat.

Josh then calls the robot company to pick Iris up under the claim that she’s not working properly. He tells Iris that he’s actually a nice guy, but when she talks back, he decreases her intelligence to 0%. She’s left basically a husk, then he forces her to set her arm on fire and shoot herself in the head.

The workers show up and grab Iris, with Josh using Iris as the blame for everything going on here. They tell him the robots record everything and despite the gunshot wound to the head, the data is only in her abdominal. Josh freaks out and tells Patrick to kill the workers, but he only gets to one before Iris is rebooted and goes after him.

She tells Patrick about Eli and how much he loved him, awakening the memories that were smothered with the reprogramming. He then kills himself. Iris is freed by the remaining worker, who lets her go back to kill Josh.

She takes Sergey’s money and drives away. As she’s leaving, she sees a man with a companion robot that looks like her, then waves, the robot part of her hand exposed because of the burn wound, much to the robot’s confusion.

Overall Thoughts

I will say: if I was going to watch a horror movie on a flight again like this, this was definitely a more tame one to watch with people around me. The blood and thriller elements were definitely there, but it wasn’t graphic enough that I’d cringe and find myself embarrassed for watching it.

I wouldn’t call this movie high art, but it definitely was entertaining. It’s not quite an original idea either, but it certainly got the job done in its short run time. Josh especially had be cracking up at his lack of self awareness—I was definitely rooting for our girl Iris in the end.

I say watch this one if you get the chance! It definitely was more mild than expected, which means it’s fairly accessible for those who find themselves squeamish in these genres.

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