Companion: When Artificial Intelligence Is The Only Intelligence

EARLY ON in Drew Hancock’s Companion, two young women named Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Kat (Megan Suri) have a prickly moment on a boozy night. When Iris asks why Kat — a close friend of Iris’ new lover Josh (Jack Quaid) — doesn’t like her, a tipsy Kat says she just doesn’t like the ‘idea’ of her. “You make me feel replaceable,” she continues. The conceit of this confession is two-pronged. Iris is deeply in love with her new boyfriend Josh, but Kat is in an abusive relationship with a controlling Russian man; the obvious implication is that Kat is bitter.

But the real implication emerges a scene or two later, when the film reveals that Iris (“Siri” when spelt backwards) is actually a companion robot. Up until then, it speaks volumes that the average male viewer may not be able to tell. Iris loves Josh so much that she is subservient to him — she wants to please him by hanging out with his friends on a weekend getaway, she craves to see him smile, and sex for them is basically Josh grunting and rolling over to sleep. It’s all too familiar. So Kat saying she feels "replaceable" by Iris is the film admitting that — in a world captured by the male gaze — a woman robot is no different from a woman.

Companion is a dark, cunning and perversely funny hybrid of robot-going-rogue allegories like Her, Ex Machina and Terminator. The story revolves around a cabin weekend turning bloody and gory when a passive Iris fights back — the twisted sci-fi equivalent of speaking up, walking out and growing a sense of self-worth. It’s not the most original gimmick. But the modern discourse around AI, combined with the film’s eerily simple take on gender politics and sexual violence, makes Companion a more contemporary and loaded experience. The subtext is disarming: Humans are so worried about machines lashing out and taking over that perhaps it’s easy to forget that they — we — are the worst of those machines. This time (and perhaps always), it’s the robots that need to survive.

The world-building of Companion is full of merciless metaphors. Iris is a plastic ‘object’ whose emotions and intellectual capacity are controlled by Josh with a remote; a running gag is that he’s kept her intelligence levels at 40 percent so that she’s just about alive enough to be sentimental and just about dead enough to obey his whims. The incident that triggers the chaos involves Iris defending herself against a debauched man trying to assault her. Which is to say that the male predatory instinct can be so vile that even a robot is shocked into sentience. Iris’ memories and feelings are prewired (quite literally), a version of social conditioning in a patriarchal environment. A subplot involves humans manipulating their bots into committing murder by illegally “modding” their settings — a genre version of gaslighting and emotional abuse. The process of buying a dormant robot and establishing a “love link” is a version of preying on women when they’re vulnerable and their judgment is impaired. Their preprogrammed love is a weakness and a strength; Iris’ battle to survive is shaped by a sense of agency somehow defeating her romantic conditioning.

Another neat device in a film of devices is the fact that the companion robots don’t know they’re robots (until a rude awakening); they are also incapable of lying. It speaks to the lack of awareness — or the reframing of truth — of those in the thick of toxic spells. Once Iris comes to terms with her identity, it still isn’t smooth sailing; her history of attachment to Josh — or at least her perception of it — is too strong for her to become an easy feminist fable. The decision to include a gay couple is smart; it speaks to how the queer community is perhaps the only ‘minority’ to have it worse in terms of cishet conditioning and social desire. One of the film’s more moving scenes features this couple in a way that implies how the loneliness of queer people is not the same as the isolation of straight men.

Companion is driven by a cast that’s not only in on all the commentary, they actively find humour in it. Sophie Thatcher plays up the Barbie-puppet aesthetic; she pulls off the tricky task of having to humanise the illusion of a ‘bad’ performance. Iris has to be still yet emotive enough to gear through progressive stages of consciousness. Thatcher doesn’t overdo the facial inertia or the (high-IQ) snark, successfully subverting the killer-bot trope in the process. Even as an automation, it says something that Iris always transcends her reduced identity as a sexbot. Jack Quaid does a Cat Person of sorts for Josh — the classic Nice Guy who thinks the world owes him everything for being a Nice Guy. Josh thinks he’s the real victim (not different from The White Lotus family pontificating on how white cis males are now the ‘minority’) of wokeness, and so his actions are amusing for how pathetic they are. Quaid makes us feel guilty for laughing at times, but it’s like watching a robot slowly mutating into its most latent form: man.

Circling back to the early tension between Iris and Kat, as hard as it is to tell that Iris is a bot, it’s harder to tell if Kat is human. She is deceptive, jealous, petty, sneaky, and a sly monster of patriarchy. Over the course of the wildly entertaining film, though, it becomes clear that those like Kat — and Josh — are irrevocably human. We often use the term as a moral antithesis to beasts and machines, but Companion is one of the few modern fables that shows how ‘human’ might have been the derogatory state all along.