Companion (

2025

)

One of the first things you learn when studying classics is that your most fundamental moral assumptions don't apply to the ancient world. Our precursors were operating under a radically different understanding of right and wrong. Where we think a good man is someone who treats everyone, even his adversaries, with compassion, the ancients believed that a virtuous man was someone who did good to his friends and harm to his enemies. Acts that are abhorrent to us were considered noble to the men and women of antiquity, and vice versa. Caesar is a great man because he killed a million Gauls and enslaved another million, not despite it. I bring this up not to brag about my mostly useless degree in ancient history, but to underscore the point that I am used to encountering art with alien moral views and not particularly squeamish about engaging with it, whatever those views may be. Yet, never in all the years I spent delving into ancient literature have I encountered a work with a moral core more bizarre and off-putting than Companion. A movie that, at the time of writing, is only a couple of months old.

Companion is a story about a pair of friends, Kat and Josh, who hatch a plot to kill Kat's wealthy boyfriend Sergei, and steal the $12,000,000 he keeps in a safe at his remote country estate. It's not exactly the most novel film premise, but Companion distinguishes itself with a sci-fi twist. You see, Companion is set in the near future, as evidenced by the film's opening, where we see two characters riding around in a self-driving car. In addition to flashier phones and self-driving vehicles, the people of next Tuesday have also developed robots that are indistinguishable from humans and possess equal intelligence to all but the most brilliant human geniuses. Moreover, these robots are not confined to research facilities or the homes of billionaires but are sold commercially and can be afforded (with a lease anyway) by guys who live in two-room apartments. This is rather a lot to expect from perhaps ten years of scientific advancement, but I have been asked to swallow more insanity from sci-fi movies before, so I'm happy to play along.

Josh has one of these sapient robots, a companion (IE sexbot) named Iris. He hacks her to increase her aggression, comments out Asimov's first law in her programming, slips a knife into her pocket, and then orchestrates a scenario where Sergei, curious about the charms of a sexbot, will try to force himself on her. Once the setup is complete, Josh just has to sit back and wait for Iris to show up covered in blood, then restore her to factory default settings, call the cops, and blame the whole thing on a malfunction.

The only problem is that after Iris realizes she's a robot (sexbots are not aware they are robots, and instead believe themselves to be human, presumably to better sell the fantasy of them being a flesh-and-blood lover), she escapes and runs off into the woods. If the authorities find her before Kat and Josh can they will undoubtedly discover proof of Josh's tampering and quickly put two and two together about who really killed Sergei. The pair of murderers recruits their friend Eli and his sex-bot Patrick to help hunt down Iris. It should be a pretty easy job under normal circumstances, but because of how Josh hacked her, Iris is more than able to defend herself.

Josh is the unquestioned villain of the story, which seems rather odd right off the bat. After all, both Josh and Kat colluded to kill Sergei. Sure, Josh did most of the legwork in actually murdering him, but the whole operation was Kat's idea. Indeed, Josh had no way of knowing about the millions Sergei kept in his vault and so wouldn't have any motive to kill Sergei without Kat's influence. Moreover, Kat deliberately misled Josh into thinking that Sergei was a Russian mobster when in fact he was a fertilizer mogul (both dirty jobs but in different ways) to assuage any guilt Josh might have about killing him. Imagine if Double Indemnity (1944) acted like Phyllis Dietrichson was blameless for the murder, and instead pinned everything on Walter Neff. They are obviously both guilty of the crime!

It would be possible to argue that the movie singles out Josh for scorn because he is the kind of guy who fucks a robot girlfriend instead of dating a real girl. Already this is an odd moral worldview that considers robo-fucking to be a more grievous offense than homicide but at least screwing a sex-bot is gross in an unfamiliar way that murder isn't. However, this cannot be the case because the movie quickly introduces another human-robot pair in the form of Eli and Patrick, who, as opposed to Josh, are treated quite sympathetically. Indeed, the movie argues that Eli really loves his sexbot as opposed to Josh, who just sees Iris as a tool for masturbation and murder. Companion evidently thinks that robo-fucking is ok... at least some of the time.

So why is Josh such a monster? The film eventually has it stated directly by Iris in a climactic scene: It's because Josh has the audacity to be a slightly below-average straight man. In the insane moral framework of the film, liking video games and having a small cock is worse than murder. It sounds like a joke when you say it out loud like that, but the movie is completely serious.

The script sounds like something an unhinged chick would write after a particularly bad breakup, where she blames society at large for conditioning her to like her ex rather than her own poor judgment. So I was a little surprised when it turned out that writer/director Drew Hancock is a guy. I suppose he could be gay (which would make sense given the oddly positive depiction of gay sexbot owners vs straight sexbot owners), or just trying to wring a little money out of the anti-straight male crowd. However, whenever a guy makes a misandristic movie like this, it's usually an indication that there are more than a few skeletons in his closet. Straight men who loudly insist that all straight men are terrible are usually just reporting on themselves.

It's a bit of a shame that the filmmakers cannot restrain their vitriolic hatred for sub-average straight guys too, because it gets in the way of exploring what kind of world Companion takes place in, which could make it a compelling sci-fi story. It cannot be our present with a couple of technological innovations added in, because if that were the case, there is no way that it would ever be acceptable to take your sexbot out in mixed company. Indeed, I find the notion that sexbots are being sold commercially a bit hard to swallow in a world where prostitution is largely outlawed. Likewise, even in a world where the vast majority of men fall below the typical female expectations, incels are singled out for special scorn and derision, so I find it hard to imagine that anything benefiting society's most hated group would ever be sold openly. A few enterprising perverts might import sex-bots from Japan, but there's no way that you could just buy one off of Amazon.

However, this premise could be made to work with a little more world-building. A world that has become more tolerant of polygamy, either officially (with multiple wives and concubines) or unofficially (with mistresses), would probably allow sexbots to be sold as a way of placating the vast majority of men who are now frozen out of any possibility of female companionship. There are many ways to go about this; you could present a world where the West has been Islamicized, either through conquest or cultural transmission. Or it could be a world suffering from crippling overpopulation, where only the most wealthy can afford the necessary breeding licenses so women attached themselves as side chicks to millionaires to have a slight chance at having babies. There are plenty of options. It's not like polygamy is rare in history; indeed, it's probably more common than the strict monogamy we're familiar with. A halfway decent sci-fi writer should be able to pick a cultural context where polygamy was normalized and work backward to recreate these conditions in their imagined future. However, the filmmakers are not really interested in that so much as they are interested in venting their hatred for those dastardly straight men who have the audacity to have boring interests and below-average cocks.

It gets worse, though, as in addition to not being particularly interested in the world-building of their sci-fi movie, the filmmakers seem not to be interested in the specifics of the story they are trying to tell either. Companion's plot is rife with issues. If you're feeling charitable, you can forgive the fact that after having her kill Sergey, Josh boots Iris back up and explains his whole evil plan to her. After all, if he doesn't do that, then the rest of the movie doesn't happen, and while it is a bit inconsistent that he would use Iris as a tool for murder and still have an emotional attachment to her, this is the kind of messy behavior I expect from human beings. What's less easily explained is the fact that Josh does it again later in the movie, after going through tremendous hassle to recapture the rogue Iris.

Ok, but Josh is an idiot, so of course, he is going to do things that make no sense and disadvantage him. Unfortunately, he's not the only character who behaves like their IQ doubles as their shoe size. Consider the technicians who come to collect Iris' inactive body and take her away in their van. They decided to boot up the unrestrained, potentially homicidal robot in the back of their van while neither one is watching her while they are driving down the highway. Why wouldn't you wait until you're back at the lab, or at the very least keep an eye on Iris when you're turning her back on? Again, this is just to facilitate the rest of the movie's events, but that only makes it worse! Characters can do stupid, incomprehensible things when they have no bearing on events, but when the plot hinges on them, they start to stand out.

Then there are all the things that I find difficult to believe, like the fact that every companion robot stores a video record of all its activities. I don't think that sexbots would catch on if their owners knew that everything they did with their sexbots was being recorded and could be readily accessed by the company selling them. This isn't the same thing as Alexa or Google Home catching your private utterances; the specific purpose these robots serve is for intimate partnership. It would be like having your computer record videos of you, but only when you were accessing pornographic websites.

Indeed, come to think of it, the central plan to trick Sergei into sexually assaulting Iris to trigger a fight or flight response from the hacked robot seems pretty far-fetched as well. Sergei is a millionaire, if he had any interest in screwing a sex-bot he has the resources to not only buy one but set her up in an apartment and visit her whenever he gets bored. It cannot be devotion to his girlfriend Kat that keeps him away from the robots, because he is already married and cheating on his wife with Kat! The whole murder plan, and consequently the plot of the movie, hinges on his never having considered getting a sexbot and having the sudden and overwhelming desire to bone one after talking to Josh for a few minutes about it. Indeed, it's also a bit odd that he wants Josh's sloppy seconds at all, when he could easily have a sexbot of his own! It's not impossible that these events could play out this way, but it seems highly unlikely. Again, the fact that the entire plot of the movie hangs on these improbabilities only compounds the issue.

There are also plenty of good old-fashioned plot holes. After Sergei is killed, Kat calls the cops immediately, and they never bother to show up. This is not like Barbarian (2022) where the cops abandon the protagonist to her fate because she sounds crazy and they have another five homicides to look into; this is a millionaire murdered in a remote area that has more bears than people. I'm sure the sheriff's office wouldn't just forget about the first homicide they've had this decade. Indeed, later on in the film, a random highway patrol officer is killed and his car is taken back to the house, and nobody goes looking for him. Hell, the robot tech support gets to the house faster than the police.

Then there is the mechanical issue with the robot, Patrick. After Iris kills Eli, Josh imprints himself on Patrick as his new lover, but somehow Patrick still has memories of Eli. Iris is able to use these lingering memories of Eli to help Patrick break Josh's control. I don't think that should be possible. Indeed, it reminds me of a gag from the Futurama episode where Fry dates the Lucy Liu robot. However, even assuming that Patrick's love for Eli can somehow transcend his programming, I'm not sure that it should matter, as Iris is the one who killed Eli! So, even if Patrick does break free from his conditioning with the power of love and return to his previous state, he should still be pissed at Iris first and foremost. It's a wasted opportunity too, because it sets up a rather funny subversion where Iris pleads with Patrick to break Josh's control of him, only to have her succeed and then realize that his motivations are still completely aligned with Josh's.

It's not that Companion is a totally atrocious film. The hints about Iris' true nature during the first part of the film are amusing, albeit obvious (beep-boop is a hilarious nickname for a robot girlfriend, though if we really had sapient robots, they would probably regard it as a slur). However, the filmmakers ran out of ideas entirely after Iris is revealed to be a robot, and the remainder of the movie devolves into watching a bunch of people run around in the woods and periodically get murdered. If that is your thing, you would probably be better off watching Friday the 13th (1980) and its sequels. They tend to have tits and impressive gore effects, not to mention better writing.