Zombos’ Closet says very good. With or without the subtextual themes, the movie is a fast-paced horror that twists and turns.
Companion firmly places any and all subtext to the background (yeah, right, just bear with me for a moment here), and pushes both robots and humans front and center, in a firmly, awkwardly, and then deadly series of tilting dominos for greet, eat, scheme, love, hate, and death. The deaths line up through a black comedy of errors, missed purposes, and clumsiness, nudging you with subtext without upstaging the horror. So in the background it stays while we get to enjoy a fast-paced comedy of terminal errors. Companion lines up its victims on both sides, leaving us wondering how something we secretly desire to happen in real life can be such a downer given human, and soon-to-worry-about, robotic natures. As for the subtexts, best you figure them out for yourself because you don’t need to figure them out for the movie to enjoy it. They are just the icing on this bloody confection.
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid), drive up to a well secluded lake house as guests, joining Kat (Megan Suri), Eli (Harvey Guillen), Patrick (Lucas Gage), and Sergey (Rupert Friend). Kat and Sergey are an item, along with Eli and Patrick, so this makes three couples planning on enjoying a quiet and fun get-together at the rich Sergey’s hide-away. They dine, they dance, then they start dying. This is a horror movie after all, so director and writer Drew Hancock moves quickly to set up the tear downs. Not all is what it seems as relationships loosen and get confused. Making matters worse is Josh’s illegal modding of software (doing your own custom programming changes that can void the warranty, etc.) on Iris, his rented boy-toy. Using his smartphone app to adjust just about anything in her robotic functions, control of her becomes part of the deadly play to follow. Even Iris finds it amusing, and useful, once she can get her hands on it.
That modding leads to the first casualty. With one person down, and the cops slowly…very slowly…heading to the lake house, events continue to spiral out of control even after Josh commands Iris to sleep. Now he’s worried about his illegal tampering of her functions, but he’s hiding a secret that worries him even more. At this point you may notice the early coloration, saturation, and tonal balance of the more copacetic opening scenes, including a cute flashback narrative opener, changes to a darker, more gritty hue and depth. Forbes ran an instructive article on how Vanessa Porter costumed both humans and robots in the movie, adding to the subtextual nature of the robot in action in subtle ways. For instance, the blood soaking Iris wears so well, is very different than the usual splattering. Her clothes are also doll-like to begin with and remain neat to a fault, even when dirty and blood soaked. There is also a 1950s Florida postcard look and feel to her clothes and headband and the early scenes.
At times, the upper hand goes to Josh, then Iris, then back to Josh, then over to somebody else, then back to Iris, then, on and on, like a game of hot potato. Jack Quaid twists Josh through a 360 so well, he is disarmingly bad with puppy dog eyes, but his practical and greedy hubris eventually works against him. Sophie Thatcher’s Iris simply is innocent at first but learns from her mistakes how to become guilty, and how to take control, deal with losing it, then taking it back.
Speaking of that hot potato, most fun of all is the MacGuffin, which is just a fancy name for something that keeps the plot moving around it. Once the secret is revealed, it rewires Kat, Eli, Patrick, and Iris in different ways as two of them become aware of it, then motivated by it, adding to the terror and fun, and wild sudden outcomes as everything moves from plan to new plan to revised new plan. What started as a pleasant get-away to lounge in and around a beautiful large house nestled by a pristene, quiet, lake in first appearance, turns into a slug-fest and fight for survival. The essence of great horror. And the script doesn’t get in the way of that by, instead, focusing on the characters and their bad decisions, twisting our perceptions into knots and making us cheer and boo for everyone as the robots become more human and the humans become more robotic in their cores.
The future is robots, AI, and humans, but, as Companion makes clear, it is the human part that may need the most modding.