Companion (2025)

Companion arrives with the tidy confidence of a film that knows exactly which conversations it intends to start and which it would prefer to avoid. Drew Hancock's debut takes the well-worn robot girlfriend and gives her a name, a rental agreement, and a boyfriend who keeps her intelligence at forty percent. The premise is a loaded weapon, and the film is smart enough to fire it in the direction of relationship power dynamics and the specific grievance of the man who believes his patience entitles him to a person. Sophie Thatcher plays Iris with a calibrated blankness that sharpens as her settings climb, and Jack Quaid's Josh delivers the nice-guy monologue with the sweaty sincerity of a man reading from a script he wrote himself.

The social consciousness here is real but selective. Iris's assault, her commodification, and her violent self-liberation form a coherent through-line about control dressed as affection. The gay couple, Eli and Patrick, carry genuine emotional weight, and Patrick's grief-driven arc is the film's second-best idea. The ensemble is diverse in the offhand way that suggests a casting director simply did the work without being asked to announce it. Race never enters the frame as a subject, and the Empathix corporation functions as a convenient villain rather than an argument about capital.

Where the film stays quiet is instructive. No climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading, no historical revision. The sermonizing is kept to a minimum, delivered through blood and dark comedy instead of a lecture. The result is a sleek, mean little machine that flirts with its own themes and then changes the subject. We have seen this before, but rarely with such clean lighting.