CW: The following review contains mild spoilers for Companion's first act as well as discussions of real-world street harassment.
Last week, I embarked on foot from my apartment to the nearby train station. Though this trek is brief, it’s often fraught with peril from male passerby in their automobiles. Even with my gigantic noise-canceling headphones firmly planted on my ears, these dudes think the only thing I want to hear is their irritating voices. That’s just what happened on this fateful day. Some guy in a pickup truck slowed his vehicle, rolled down his window, and kept beckoning me to go over to his automobile. I kept my eyes focused ahead and on my music. He still wouldn’t leave me alone.
For one moment, he even drove ahead and pulled into a parking lot I was about to walk through. This inspired me to scurry out of sight (thank God I was right next to a library) and hold my breath while waiting for him to pass. This terrifying experience is unfortunately common for me and other folks of marginalized genders just trying to exist. Let me tell you, I never had people calling to me from their cars when I walked out in public before I publicly transitioned! Often, I’ll think of why people would behave this way and then one word pops into my head: control.
Men believe they’re entitled to romantic companionship or physical affection, a perception the richest and most powerful dudes in the world happily reaffirm. Why would they think I or anyone else they catcall have “feelings”? They only see us as objects that can fulfill their craving for power, not to mention revenge against all the “mean” women in their lives. I’m clearly not the only one experiencing this phenomenon. So pervasive is this experience that it's even seeped into movies like writer/director Drew Hancock’s directorial debut Companion.
Technically, this movie begins on a more joyful note than street harassment, as Iris (Sophie Thatcher) recalls the grocery store meet-cute where she ran into her lover, Josh (Jack Quaid). Hancock’s screenplay then jumps forward to the duo arriving at Kat’s (Megan Suri) cabin for a luxurious weekend away from society. Once they arrive, the pair begin walking up to Kat's door only for Iris to stop. She's clearly gripped with anxiety over all the impending social interactions with Josh’s pals. “I’m so worried I’m going to say something stupid or mess up,” she mournfully explains.
Right then and there, I felt my heart aching for Iris. As an autistic person with lots of self-consciousness and years of being “othered” by neurotypicals, I too often approach social situations with concerns of “how I am going to mess this one up?” That comes from self-inflicted ableism, it’s not fair to me, but it’s still part of my psyche. Having Iris channel such vulnerable qualities immediately makes her an emotionally compelling protagonist to anchor a thriller around. Josh’s dismissive attitude towards her concerns (“You’re bringing this up now? When we’re already here?” is his first response rather than reassuring her she’s awesome) also nicely establishes that, as Michael Keaton on Saturday Night Live would say, “this one who has all the warning signs.”
From there, Iris and the other denizens of Kat’s cabin, including Kat's sugar daddy Sergey (Rupert Friend) and lovers Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), get along okay, if punctuated with bouts of awkwardness. Yet something soon goes hideously wrong that unveils a new truth for Iris. She isn’t a human being. The fact that she can instantly tell the weather isn’t some cute quirk. She’s a robot. Far be it from me to say what happens next. The twisty fun of Hancock’s screenplay isn’t just its surprises. It’s also watching how nonchalant pieces of dialogue or rudimentary robotic programming pay off in dramatic or comedic terms.
There’s no denying that Iris resonated with me profoundly. But you don’t have to deeply relate to a fictional character for a movie to be good. Even beyond me constantly going “she’s just like me for real” at Iris, Companion still crackles as a tremendously entertaining thriller. Coming in under 100 minutes even with credits, Hancock’s script packs in a lot of ingenuity into a brief runtime. This includes the script's brief non-linear digressions into the past and even (for one sequence) a handful of potential futures. How lovely that Companion’s confident enough to indulge in fleeting narrative detours for the sake of entertaining material rather than suffocatingly adhere exclusively to standard chronological storytelling.
There’s also the deeply sharp sense of comic timing permeating the proceedings. Two gags centered around the camera suddenly cutting to Josh orgasming, especially, are so hysterical because of the preciseness in Hancock’s writing and Brett W. Bachman & Josh Ethier’s editing. Hancock, cinematographer Eli Born, and costume designer Vanessa Porter also make Companion a visual treat. What a welcome sight in this day and age of so many low-budget Blumhouse thriller/horror movies executed with nary a trace of striking imagery.
The film’s colorful costumes for Iris are especially memorable. She’s immediately so distinctively dressed compared to everyone else in Kat’s cabin. Porter’s costumes solidify surrounding humans "othering" Iris. It’s also fun seeing all those vivid hues coated in new layers of grime, blood, and dirt as Companion’s story progresses. Hancock and Born’s camerawork sensibilities, meanwhile, happily grasp the importance of space when executing visual gags. A deeply humorous beat where Eli and Patrick are on the phone in the foreground while Iris darts away in the background wouldn’t be nearly as memorable if it didn’t occur in an unbroken wide shot.
All these absorbing qualities coalesce to create a terrific crowd pleaser. Companion thrives in its most intimate details, but it also delivers the most delightful instantaneous pleasures of a thriller. It’s a sensationally enthralling touch, for example, that Josh keeps getting physically attacked one body part at a time (a punch to the throat here, a car door slammed on fingers there.)
Above all else, Companion solidified to me (as one of the bad gay girlies who doesn’t watch Yellowjackets) Sophie Thatcher’s tremendous acting chops. She's so skilled at selling Iris's initial docile state and then peeling back range in her performance. Though she’s playing an automaton, Thatcher lends such emotional reality to this figure. Her messy depiction of Iris breaking down upon discovering she’s a robot especially crystallizes this accomplishment. It’s a heart-shattering depiction of a frantic existential crisis that wouldn’t be out of place in an acclaimed grounded drama.
Thatcher’s even deeply engrossed in Iris’s quietest moments, which Hancock’s script smartly makes time for. I absolutely adored a bit where she’s just fiddling around with a remote that can change her eye color or voice. It’s a moment where we see Iris defined by her own curiosities, not her relationship with possessive human beings. Here and throughout the rest of Companion, Thatches realizes Iris with such humanity and unwavering commitment. No wonder I was immediately reminded of my own traumatic experiences in what’s ostensibly a sci-fi thriller.
Much like The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle’s screenwriter subsequently delivered Manchester by the Sea, it’s staggering to consider Fred 3: Camp Fred's screenwriter wrote and directed a sublime feature like Companion. Must-see movies like this one really can come from anywhere, as Anton Ego might say!