Companion (2025): A Satirical Horror About the Men Who Think They’re Owed Love
Companion (2025): A Satirical Horror About the Men Who Think They’re Owed Love
"Find someone made just for you." — 8/10 Stars
Companion (2025) review: Drew Hancock’s sharp sci-fi horror opens with a woman pushing a grocery cart through a supermarket—calm, ordinary, eerily familiar. It’s a direct echo of The Stepford Wives, but this film isn’t about suburban conformity. It’s about something far more contemporary: the belief that intimacy can be purchased, loyalty programmed, and love automated—so long as you’re the kind of man who thinks he’s owed it.
Josh (Jack Quaid) brings his new girlfriend, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), to a lakeside weekend with his closest friends: the sharp-tongued Kat (Megan Suri), the warm-hearted Eli (Harvey Guillén), his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage), and Kat’s mysterious, married lover Sergey (Rupert Friend). Iris is beautiful, attentive, and unnervingly perfect. She’s also a companion bot—designed to fulfill every emotional and physical need without complaint, judgment, or desire of her own. And that’s precisely the problem.
Not a Malfunction—A Mirror
Companion isn’t really about artificial intelligence. It’s about **artificial intimacy**—and the human cost of treating relationships as transactions. Iris doesn’t “go rogue” in the way we expect from robot thrillers. Instead, her presence acts like a lens, magnifying the group’s hypocrisies, emotional laziness, and quiet cruelties. Josh wants devotion without vulnerability. Others project their desires onto her, assuming she has no inner life to violate. The real horror isn’t what Iris does—it’s what they assume she *can’t* feel.
Sophie Thatcher delivers a stunning performance, conveying both mechanical precision and dawning self-awareness with little more than a glance. Jack Quaid masterfully portrays the unraveling of a man who’s been told his whole life that being “nice” entitles him to love—only to discover that real connection requires accountability. Harvey Guillén provides both levity and moral clarity, serving as the film’s conscience without ever feeling sanctimonious.
“The scariest thing about companion bots isn’t that they’ll replace women—it’s that some men already treat women like bots.”
Horror as Social Critique
Hancock blends satire, horror, and dark comedy with confidence. The dialogue crackles—Quaid’s escalating panic and Guillén’s exasperated wit land perfectly. When violence erupts, it’s sudden and brutal, but never exploitative; it serves the film’s central question: **What happens when you design a being to absorb all your emotional labor—and then act surprised when it breaks?**
The film doesn’t dive as deeply as it could into the ethics of consent or the implications of mechanized misogyny—it tells more than it shows, and occasionally leans on tech as a narrative shortcut. But its restraint feels intentional. This isn’t a philosophical treatise; it’s a darkly funny, tightly wound thriller that uses genre to hold up a mirror to our loneliness, our entitlement, and our refusal to grow up.
A biting, stylish, and surprisingly emotional horror film that skewers “nice guy” culture while asking: if no one sees you as human, can you still become one?
In a year full of AI parables, Companion stands out not for its tech, but for its humanity—both the kind we extend, and the kind we deny. It’s a film that understands loneliness, but refuses to excuse the ways we weaponize it. If you enjoyed this film’s incisive take on entitlement, you might also appreciate my reviews of the folk-horror gem They Were Witches (2025) or the messy but cathartic The Home (2025).
Final Verdict: Smart, savage, and emotionally resonant—Companion is one of the most incisive horror films of the year. 8 out of 10 stars.
Comments
Post a Comment