By Shane Mead | Staff Writer
A young adult couple joins a group of friends for a getaway vacation in a remote lakeside cabin. If you’re not hooked yet, it’s probably because you’ve seen this movie before. The first layer of the plot of “Companion” — released in theaters on Jan. 31— certainly didn’t take a whole lot of thought to muster up.
Fortunately, the rest of the plot isn’t half-bad. Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, is a humanoid companion robot with the sole purpose of making her boyfriend happy.
And when I say sole purpose, I mean sole purpose. It’s the one and only reason that Josh, played by Jack Quaid, — a misogynistic, lazy, good-for-nothing embodiment of everything wrong with society, bought her in the first place.
Man, they do a great job at making him unlikeable.
Oh, and Iris will have sex with Josh whenever he wants. She can’t say no. Can we talk about that? That’s quite the can of worms—
Anyway, moving on! I think that’s what writer and director Drew Hancock wanted anyway since he didn’t once delve into the implications of his consent-less world.
Things go a bit haywire when Iris has her robotic freakout, setting up the rest of the film. Josh and his friends are left to actually figure things out themselves, which is quite difficult considering the main character clearly believes he’s owed everything and owes nothing.
While it was fun to watch them struggle to navigate their well-deserved trials and tribulations, the film was jam-packed with convenient surprises and plot holes that made it hard to be taken seriously.
“Companion“ struggled to find its identity. It’s a jack of all trades in the sense that it fits into a ton of different genres, but it truly was the master of none. It wasn’t scary enough to be horror, wasn’t funny enough for comedy, wasn’t romantic enough. Any genre you’d think of — it wasn’t enough.
Take “Get Out” for example — a film that blends horror, satire and social commentary seamlessly. It knows exactly what it is, keeping you scared and on the edge of your seat while also highlighting a societal flaw and poking fun at those parts of the problem.
“Companion” feels like it wanted to achieve that same multi-genre impact but never fully committed to any of its ideas. There were no new thoughts or ideas brought to the table. Misogyny is bad, AI can be scary and our society is aimed in the wrong direction. How profound — this guy should be the next Plato!
It had the potential to really dig deep into some of these themes but instead turned into a plastic spoon on a concrete wall, hardly scratching the surface.
Despite my complaints, you may be surprised to hear I wasn’t mad about this one. It certainly had shock value and had its moments where a joke hit. But it also had moments where you whisper to your buddy exactly what’s going to happen, and then you scoff because it’s the most predictable thing you can imagine, and you wonder why a $10 million-budget film is going in the exact direction your non-filmmaker brain just thought of.
Nonetheless, it was enjoyable and those 97 minutes of runtime flew by — which caught me off-guard. The execution was poor and the product wasn’t great, but I still recommend you see “Companion” for yourself.
