“Like Alex Garland’s ‘Ex Machina’ and Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’, ‘Companion’ uses a juicy science-fiction premise – in this case, if we could hire robotic lovers, how might we treat them? – as the pretext for a dark parable about male manipulation and coercion of women,” said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph.
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is a “pretty, softly spoken” robot who has been programmed to provide companionship for her “midwit” boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid). Together, they head off to spend a weekend with friends at a remote lake house owned by a Russian tycoon (Rupert Friend), where Iris goes violently rogue. There is a “wonderful delicacy to Thatcher’s performance, as the actress expertly toggles between uncanny and natural from moment to moment”, and the film is a treat – “an unabashed whoop-out-loud romp: one of those films in which horrible things happen constantly to horrible people, as the moral arc of the universe bends itself around to kick the backsides of everyone involved”.
“Clever, funny and exquisitely cast”, this is a “slick modern thriller” that takes the viewer in “totally unexpected” directions, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. The violence ratchets up as the “grippingly paced story unfolds”, but the film “also has insightful things to say about what it is to be human, our interaction with technology, and the nature of evil”.
Companion is certainly “clever”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times, and you probably won’t be bored, “but clever is all it is: you will wish it had dared to play with real emotions, rather than just the preset sort. Even Ridley Scott’s replicants seemed to dream of a life beyond their programming.”