'Companion' (2025)

This is kind of the droid you're looking for

I’ve mentioned before how I approach film criticism by comparing the best version of a film against its final cut. Generally speaking, the wider the gap between those two things, the weaker the film is.

But saying that about Companion — whose final cut is the fourth or fifth best version of itself — would be disingenuous. For one thing, it’s not a weak film whatsoever; the choices it makes are conducive to great filmmaking and storytelling, and the choices it does not make (but very arguably should have) are even more conducive to the future of those two things. I have little trouble believing that Companion ran so that another sci-fi film will sprint, perhaps even soar.

More importantly, though — and this goes for every film — there is nothing interesting about the endgame of determining how strong or weak Companion is. Like Iris, this film is so much more than a decoration for our Best Of lists and organized-by-awesomeness DVD shelves. Let’s discuss.

Companion stars Sophie Thatcher as Iris, a young woman who is absolutely infatuated with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid), who quite blatantly harbors the emotional intelligence of of an empty Mountain Dew can. Iris is wary at first about fitting in with Josh’s friends, but after a horrifying encounter with the owner of the cabin, Sergey (Rupert Friend), Iris plows head-first into a series of revelations as liberating as they are disturbing. Also, there’s a body count.

I don’t say this often, but the floor and ceiling of Companion can best be explored with the question of who this movie is for. Ostensibly, the most correct answer would be women, who could collectively scream for thousands and thousands of years about the men of this world who want to define their relationships not by mutual growth and love, not even by attraction, but by control. This need for control, born in such folk out of deep insecurity and learned notions of entitlement, is a prevalent target that can and should be sent up.

And get sent up it does. Beyond the way it strips away the contrived layers of Josh to reveal the manipulative man-child underneath, this culture of control is nodded to in secondary and tertiary ways as well, most notably in the quick back-and-forth between Empathix employees Sid and Teddy about what some of these clients do with their robots (apparently, there’s another Iris chained up in a basement somewhere).

My question is, what thoughts are being provoked that haven’t been provoked before? It’s vindicating for most to watch the consequences of Josh’s actions unfold, but we’re no more enlightened on how he and people like him come about by the film’s end. Are men like Josh bad only because they’re bad? The gender divide harms women disproportionately, but even with Iris’ victory, Companion’s focus on her evasion-turned-vengeance against Josh only deepens that divide. What if the next Iris isn’t so lucky? How might a lonely boy in danger of growing into a Josh feel after watching Companion?

I’d wager it would be less “Don’t be this guy,” and more “What if there’s no hope for me?”

But I’m not suggesting that Companion should have made Josh more sympathetic. What I am suggesting — nay, asserting — is that the best version of Companion does not primarily focus on how horrible Josh is (it only really needs a third of its story beats to drive home its takedown of this culture of control anyway), but how limitless Iris is.

The best scene in the film is shortly after Iris makes a break for it after escaping from the cabin, and she sits by a tree, noodling around on the smartphone app that controls all of her features. She somewhat-giddily toys with the eye color feature, experiments with different voices, and cranks up her intelligence from 40 to 100, wondrously embracing an enlightenment that was cruelly kept from her because she had to be a girlfriend.

The beauty of this scene is how it evokes the feminine discovery of one’s body and mind that so many social structures directly and indirectly want to prevent (or: keep under control). Another cut of Companion would have seen Iris explore her erogenous zones alongside her eye color and voice.

More to the point, I would argue that a better cut of Companion would take fuller interest in who Iris is when Josh isn’t in the picture. In the cut we get, her freedom is ultimately won, but we still only really become familiar with her rage; rage that’s as dependent on Josh as her doting, pre-murder self was.

But there are vast galaxies inside of Iris’ mind that are more expansive and remarkable than how any man or woman might define her (men by her body and capacity for obedience, women by her service as a vehicle for anarchic, symbolic violence against those men). She does, after all, begin and end the movie by sharing an existential musing on emotional polarity with us.

Also consider Iris’ body. It functions in service to Josh at the outset, and it functions in service to the audience by her scrappy movement through the world and against her pursuers (because we want Iris to win).

Her body is only really in service to Iris herself in the quieter, more peaceful moments of the film, i.e. the tree/smartphone scene, and the moment where she tears off a layer of skin and gazes at her robot hand, trying on new clothes shortly after.

I struggle to see how that isn’t the better film. Why make Iris’ odyssey a primarily adversarial one when you could instead centralize her independent boundlessness, all while maintaining the bits and pieces that contextualize the social significance of accessing that boundlessness? Indictments of toxic masculinity/relationships can spring up from most any material, but the premise of Companion provides an opportunity to go so much further than that. You wouldn’t even have to do away with its pulpier genre elements or Iris’ rage.

And what better way to spotlight the insidiousness of shackling the galaxies inside women than by making the gorgeous extent of those galaxies your focal point? By zeroing in on the lonely men who this world manipulates into doing that shackling? I think not.

I’m not done here, either; I haven’t even touched on the similarly untapped potential of Companion’s queer elements. I will, however, be saving those for a separate post; I think it’s high time that I regularly diversified and compartmentalized the criticism I write here on The Treatment. What good is my own galaxy if it’s playing by film review rules?

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