Companion

AI-ble Silence

Companion
Directed by Drew Hancock
USA 2025
New Line Cinema
UK cinema release print.

Warning: The same amount of spoilerage as in the trailer.

So... Companion. Yeah, kinda but... mostly naaah/meh, I would have to say.

I was looking forward to this one a lot as the two trailers I saw for the film looked very interesting. And, to be fair, the film is well shot/edited/acted (for the most part) but, for a film with a great (if already overused) cinematic premise, the writing was really not too good on this one.

So lets start with those trailers... and the poster for that matter... we can see very clearly that the title ‘companion’ role, played by the always great Sophie Thatcher (who has been so good in Yellowjackets), is obviously a robot sex companion who is, at some point in the movie, going to go into kill mode. And, yeah, I know that ‘sexbots going into homicidal revenge territory’ seems to be a trending cinematic topic of late (at least with independent movies... this may be the first of them released theatrically in this cycle) but, hey it’s a plot I’m always a sucker for so, again, I was expecting a lot more from this. However, the fact that the film spends the first quarter of the movie building to the reveal that Thatcher is, indeed, a controlled robotic companion... really does seem like a total waste of time.

So the big ‘twist reveal’ (or first of them) is no twist at all if you’ve seen the marketing materials. And I would normally go on to say that, had I not seen the publicity for this one I may have been taken by surprise and had a better time with it... the truth is that the dialogue is so loaded with precursors to that reveal that I would have figured it out pretty quickly anyway. And then of course, there’s a little ‘revelation building’ on that reveal which, given a certain character’s ‘meet cute’ implanted memories, is very much a case of ‘fool me once, shame on me... fool me twice’...

In other words, Companion has absolutely no surprises in store for the audience and, again unfortunately for the viewer, it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is. And that’s such a shame because, honestly, I really wanted to like this one.

So good points... well, almost everything else about the movie apart from the writing is pretty good, it has to be said. Thatcher is absolutely magnificent as the ‘Stepford Wife’ so to speak and, funnily enough, Jack Quaid (son of Denis Quaid and Meg Ryan) as the almost comically ineffectual antagonist of the film, is also pretty great in this. These two actors specifically have some great comic timing between them, for sure. And fans of gory violence will also find this movie ticks their boxes, some of which is definitely not lingered on anymore than it has to be... for example, after we see a person with his face repeatedly bashed in, when the body is revisited shortly after, the aftermath is not revisited and its other characters’ reactions which tell the story.

Actress Megan Suri is also pretty good in this, playing the girlfriend of a red herring of a main antagonist who proves to be anything but. So more movies from her please.

Other than that though... yeah, I can’t think of anything more I want to add to this review. Companion is a film that I suspect has a built-in teenage audience who will lap it up and love this film, mostly because a lot of them may not have seen anything like this before. I think many others in the audience, though, may find themselves a little jaded to the film’s obvious charms and realise that, maybe the script isn’t as intelligent as one might expect from a marketing campaign that manages to hit all the right spots... alas.