Companion (2025)

The plot of Companion: A group of people congregate at the house of a Russian millionaire Sergey and his girlfriend Kat, in the back of no-where. They are Josh, with his girlfriend Iris and Eli with his boyfriend Patrick. Iris and Josh apparently met in a supermarket when a display of oranges failed. The house is at the edge of a lake and Sergey goes to the lake beach to sunbath, followed by Iris, who has been surprised to find a flick knife in her pocket. Sergey attempts to rape Iris, and she stabs him in the neck. Back in the house she finds herself tied to a chair, with Josh explaining that she is a robot  and her memory of their meeting was something inserted, one of several available. He also explains he has hacked her programming, removed her don’t kill any humans instruction and increased her aggression. Iris gets free, steals Josh’s phone and increases her intelligence to 100% then escapes to the woods. It turns out that it was all a plan and that Kat, Josh and Eli are there to steal Sergey’s money. Why does Patrick not count? He is a robot as well.  They go out to find Iris in the woods, Eli with Sergey’s big revolver, with which Iris accidently kills him. She tries to get away, but she’s a robot. Can she do it?

Content: We see Josh having noisy, but decorously presented, sex with Iris, before we find out she is a robot. Some drinking and someone apparently takes Xanax (I don’t know what that is). We see the scene of Josh and Iris meeting and also a flashback of her being taken out of her box and made to be fixated on Josh. Later there is a flashback of Patrick’s memory of meeting Eli. We see Sergey being stabbed in the throat, as he implies that it is part of Iris’s function to engage in sex. There is a terrific scene of Iris meeting with a deputy-sheriff, and in order to avoid telling him the truth about the questions he is asking (apparently a robot requirement) she switches her speech to German. Now and again we see an electric corkscrew being used, why?

A View:   Apparently the studio spent $29 million promoting this film. What did they spend it on? We had never heard anything about it. Maybe $29 million is not much in terms of film promotion. It was shown in the smallest of the 12 screens in our Madrid cinema, to a limited number of us on its opening day. I am a bit of a fan of robot films so I thought it might be fun, and sure enough it was. The cast did a great job, particularly Sophie Thatcher, fresh from Heretic, and the script did enough to keep us engaged as things rolled along, Iris’s every effort to survive being apparently overcome at some point by Josh’s control of her. On one level it is fun, on another it could be an allegory of controlling relationships. But either way, well worth the cost of a cinema admission, and if you choose to wait until it is available to download, don’t miss it.

Fun Fact: I like to think that those of us who were in the screening were there because we are fans of Harvey Guillén, Guillermo in What We Do in the Shadows.