*Warning* This review contains spoilers.

Walking out of the theater after seeing Companion (2025), written and directed by Drew Hancock, I am sad to say I am quite disappointed. The movie fell short for me in several ways. I want a movie to do at least one of two things: 1) make me feel something, or 2) make me think. I have to say the only thing I felt coming out of this movie was frustration for all the ways it fell short.

First and foremost, the movie lacked substantive characters. A movie should have characters you either really like, or really dislike. This movie had neither. Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, starts off with a strong personality as viewers wonder about her damaged origin story that would allow her to so faithfully love such a simple and uncaring partner. Once she is revealed to be a robot, her entire backstory disintegrates alongside her intrigue as a character. Now all she is is a simple robot girl fighting for independence. Josh, played by Jack Quaid, appears at first to only be a shitty boyfriend, but we come to find out he is just a pathetic sociopath who desires control. He hardly cares at all when his friends are murdered as a result of his heist to steal money. Hancock missed an opportunity to turn him into an actually scary monster in the film. But he isn’t scary or unhinged enough to frighten the viewer while he hunts Iris down, and the viewer is mostly left feeling sorry for him. When Iris finally murdered Josh in the film’s climax, I didn’t feel triumphant for Iris or sorry for Josh. I sort of just shrugged.

Companion comes across like a movie that is confused about its genre. With elements of science fiction, comedy, horror, and romance the film struggled to deliver any specific element that makes each of those genres great. When working in a genre, it’s necessary to understand its tropes. A writer can either subvert or lean into them. Writer Director Drew Hancock did neither. 

Let’s first consider science fiction. Established in key works like Ex Machina (2014) and Westworld (2016), Companion follows the common trope of the sexualized gynoid battling for independence: Iris battles Josh for her autonomy throughout the movie. But we never really question whether she will escape, and even if she does, we hardly care. Iris is not likeable enough to root for, nor does she seem intelligent enough to think critically about our own consciousness and what it might mean, even after she boosts her intelligence level to 100%. Ex Machina was written and directed well before the emergence of LLM’s and Alex Garland produced a significantly more impressive work, enabling audience’s to deeply question what it means to be human, what it means to be alive for that matter. Iris’s escape from the secluded mansion in a luscious green naturescape mirrored Ava’s escape from techno-billionaire Nathan’s nature-mansion so closely it may as well be called plagiarism. With our culture’s current obsession with generative AI, filmmakers working in the science fiction genre have their work cut out for them, and I’m sorry to say that Hancock’s attempt fell short of the mark.

The comedy genre is the one that the film was closest to pulling off, highlighted by some comedic simulated robot memories of meet cutes with their partners. Harvey Guillén’s portrayal of Eli the gay friend, served as a loveable comic relief character and delivered an enjoyable performance that ended far too quickly after Iris kills him in her attempted escape.

As a genre, horror should reveal something to the audience about themselves. Who or what is the monster and why are we afraid of them? The word monster is actually derived from the Latin monstrare, or, to demonstrate. In the beginning, the movie tries to establish Iris as the monster as she reveals that she will kill her partner, Josh. As the movie progresses, we learn that the true monster is the sad and lonely Josh who feels so unfairly treated by the world that he will do anything in his power to enact power over the beings around him, human and robot alike. Hancock wants us to fear Iris for her realistic consciousness and Josh for his sociopathy. Neither character plays the part well, but the blame falls more so on a poorly written script than the actors’ performances. Sadly, Hancock’s decision to include some light gore and body mutilation wasn’t enough to situate the film firmly in the horror genre.

Finally, romance. If Hancock could only improve one element of the story to salvage the movie, it would be the romantic thread between Iris and Josh. At the core of the movie, it feels like Hancock is trying to follow in the footsteps of Ich Bin Dein Mensch (2021) and explore the ethical implications of having your partner be a robot. The issue is, Hancock does so little to demonstrate any sort of depth to Josh and Iris’s relationship, and the moral questions aren’t explored in any serious way. With a run time of a little over an hour and a half, Hancock could have spent some more time in act one developing a more believable relationship. The most frustrating thing to me is that Hancock could have drastically improved the film by cutting out all of the science fiction from the plot and leaning into the couple’s unhealthy dynamics of control. Exploring the ways Josh’s control over Iris manifests and the ways in which she struggles to recapture it likely would have been enough. If their love or hate for one another felt more authentic, the climax would have been felt more viscerally.