Companion – REVIEW

Sophie Thatcher in Companion


For clarity reasons, I actually saw this nearly a week ago. While Companion did open this weekend, the theater near me did a mystery screening and it ended up being an early showing of Companion. That being said, I waited this long to put up my review because this is a *very* tough movie to review without spoiling the main twist. Granted, the twist of the movie is shown in the trailer I linked at the bottom of this post, just below the grade. If you want to just skip to that letter grade, go right ahead. And if you want a very brief review, Companion is just a damn good horror-comedy, which is something that we really don’t get a lot of these days. Okay, now is **SPOILER TIME**, which means I’ll just be going into the main premise of the movie. Not detailed plot points or anything, but what this movie is has to do with why I liked it. What makes talking about Companion so interesting is the two differing synopses for the movie. The first one, which is the main one you’ll see on IMDb and Letterboxd, reads that the death of a billionaire is the catalyst for disaster that affects a young woman named Iris and her friends during a weekend getaway. Yes, that’s true, that’s a major plot point of the movie; it’s arguably what kicks the movie into high gear. When you search Companion on Google, though, you’ll find the second synopsis: “A weekend getaway turns bloody and violent when a subservient android that's built for human companionship goes haywire.” Companion isn’t just a horror-comedy, it’s a sci-fi movie. It also immediately lets you figure out what the movie’s about, even before revealing the main twist. That being said, knowing that Iris is a robot heading into the movie did suck, but there's a good amount of extra twists here, so it just sort of balanced itself out. Sophie Thatcher, who plays Iris, is the big standout of Companion. I prefer her in this over her last leading role, the religious horror movie Heretic, mainly because there’s just so much more to work with. The director, Drew Hancock in his debut feature, also wrote the movie, and Iris feels a lot more realized here than Thatcher’s character from Heretic. A huge assist from that, though, comes from Jack Quaid, playing Iris’s “boyfriend.” I’ve liked Quaid in the things I’ve seen him in, but taking the toxic boyfriend route just makes his face so punchable. Even before the main reveal, you know what kind of boyfriend Quaid is. Jack Quaid is pretty likeable in his other roles I’ve seen, so putting him in a role like this just made a lot of sense to me. The rest of the cast give good support to Thatcher and Quaid, especially Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage. The latter recently gave a small but spectacular performance in Smile 2, so it’s nice to see Gage flex some more in horror. Honestly, I don’t have much else to say about Companion other than this: “Beep Boop” is a diabolical pet name.


Ryan’s Grade: B+