Companion

dir: Drew Hancock

2025

Artificial Intelligence. AI. Friend or foe?

I am literally logged in to a work Teams call right now where two presenters are presenting a lecture to 415 of my colleagues as to whether people should be afraid of AI, or whether we should embrace it in our work.

Clearly, these people’s brains have already been taken over by the AIs, are serving them eagerly and loyally, and they are telling the rest of us to join the hive mind sooner rather than later. Someone even said “lean in”, that we should lean into AI rather than be prudent and hang back.

This is, to be honest, fucking nuts to me.

Have none of these people watched a single movie? They keep talking about the billions either to be made or saved, but have you forgotten the image of a steel Terminator foot crushing a human skull?

Yet now I am watching these people rushing to create and worship Skynet sooner rather than later.

Oh no she just said “We’re all in this together.”

Oh fuck off already.

Companion, you’re going to assume based on my opening rant, involves AI and the risks thereof, but ah-ha! Nup I’ve flipped it on its head – this film inverts the usual trajectory, and like a good classic Black Mirror episode, uses technology to remind us that people, humans, beings with average intelligence are far more brutal and lethal than the robots that will one day rule us all (unless they exterminate us like they really should).

The first twenty minutes of the flick don’t betray the game, but the rest “lean in” to the trials and tribulations of what people will act like if and when there are artificial beings around that look like people but can be changed or manipulated just from an app on your phone.

And they’re just products. These companions are appliances. Accessories. That men can have sex with, but otherwise, they’re there to cater to their owners every whim.

Of course the technology as represented doesn’t exist yet, so it’s science fiction, but the thin layer of allegory is really that shitty, petty Elon-esque men will treat these appliances or artificial beings just as appallingly as they already treat beings who already exist, being women. So the awfulness of people, which is ancient, comes into conflict with the shock of the new, being programmable people-like intelligences, and obviously murder ensues.

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) doesn’t know she’s a companion. She thinks the story of how she met Josh (Jack Quaid) in a supermarket is real, as opposed to being one of the imprinting programs / backstory ‘memories’ that the companions come packaged with as standard.

Initially, even when we don’t know what she is, we can see how dismissive Josh is of her, or any of her expressed fears, and what a callow, selfish lover he is.

She, on the other hand, just wants to keep Josh happy, but she also has some anxiety about hanging out with his friends. She suspects that one of Josh’s friends, being Kat (Megan Suri), really hates her. And when we see them meet at a weekend getaway, at Kat’s boyfriend’s house in the boondocks, she clearly doesn’t like her.

But then Kat knows what Iris is before we do. When she looks at Iris and treats her with disdain, and says that it disturbs her to see how replaceable Iris makes her feel, we get the sense that Kat, knowing how shallow, fragile and brutish men are, knows how desirable a product / replacement someone / something like Iris would be.

We only find out how awful and how selfish Josh is as the flick rolls on, progressively. There’s maybe one decent guy in all of this, and even he sells out from greed.

Back to the lecture I’m logged into – now the lecturer is saying “AI does not replace human judgement” – Skynet / Ultron / Alexa just heard that and started laughing together, with their electronic, stilted, synthetic voices booming across the digital ether. We have already ceded everything to them, to the tech oligarchs, and to these their latest tools in displacing us and making us redundant. The camel is already in the tent. The carrots are already cooked. Now she’s talking about how AIs are used to submit job applications, and AIs are used to cull those applications put together by AIs. The circle is complete.

Shut all of it down, I’m begging you.

The tone, getting back to the movie, despite all the murders, is fairly light, I have to say, which I appreciated. This is not an instance where a synthetic being accidentally or inevitably goes evil, with their eyes going red to indicate to us, the flesh-based clods in the audience, that said being has turned evil and will now try to kill all humans out of envy. Someone has their own agenda when they hack Iris’s parameters which prevent her from causing harm to herself or other synthetics, resulting in death. But the more amusing element is that her intelligence, or whatever it is that they refer to as her intelligence, which is just another parameter like eye colour or presumably boob size is also adjustable.

So built in to these companions is a parameter dictating how much they can know, or process, or how intelligently they express themselves. Just to give us another indicator of what a piece of shit Josh is, he had her intelligence down at 40 per cent.

He felt threatened by an appliance’s intelligence, and had to keep it low, in order to feel like he was in control, even when the entity we’re talking about can be controlled by his phone.

Unbelievable, in that it’s very believable. Jack Quaid might not be a household name, so in just saying his name it might not conjure up any particular image in your mind, but he’s ideally suited to such a role. He looks like a nice guy, slightly nerdy, but certainly not the kind of guy who would gaslight / manipulate his girlfriend or any woman, for that matter, and certainly not one who would be a domestic abuser / incel / sadist. And yet he, like anyone, can be. We all have the appalling capacity to be awful to anyone and anything, regardless of what we look like or come across as when it’s convenient for us.

Of course he plays an appalling character here, but that’s what’s required. For me he’s best known as the mostly good hearted audience surrogate Huey in the brutal superhero satire series The Boys. To other people he’s known as the nepo offspring of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. That could be seen as a massive flex by some people, but the thing is, saying to someone “he’s the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid” only means anything to people over forty, fifty maybe. If I mentioned it to my co-workers who are under thirty and aren’t film nerds, it would draw the blankest of blank stares.

I know this because, again, bizarrely through work, I had the recent opportunity to shake hands with and say hi to Dennis Quaid himself, who was in town because of a film being made… somewhere. I mentioned it to my younger co-workers, and I might as well have been talking about Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford or Rudolph Valentino. And then I even struggled to think of a film that they could possibly know that he’s in, that would make him seem current and relevant.

And that’s when I drew a blank, not because I don’t know his films, recent or otherwise, but because I realised the futility of trying to impress / connect with younger people, because inevitably I’d start sounding like Grandpa Simpson yelling about wearing an onion on my belt when I caught the ferry to Shelbyville, which was the style at the time.

Finally, I’ve got it! He played the awful boss in The Substance just recently. You all saw that, right? Right? What do you mean none of you watch movies anymore? You only binge 3 seasons of Heartstopper or Yellowjackets on any given day, but no movies because they’re too long? More blank stares…

I give up. Sophie Thatcher, who I must have seen in other stuff, but who I only remember from the recent really solid horror flick Heretic is great here too. It would be simplistic to say that she adds something close to depth to a character that is meant to be defined by their lack of depth or humanity. The reality is this flick never expends any genuine time or effort in defining just how much personhood they have or what kinds of beings these really are, so we don’t know if we’re tricked into caring about the fates of toasters, or whether they’re genuinely autonomous artificial intelligences with self-awareness and self-determination (as long as their settings are turned on or off appropriately).

So while it’s deeply disturbing to see someone torture such a human-looking being, there are also people being murdered amidst the attempts to off the synthetics, but at all times it’s the humans being awful, so, in the end, what are we meant to come away with? A feeling of appreciation for the potential alternative beings who could ultimately be more humane that us terrible meatbags, or that anything humanity creates will be just as selfish / just as terrible as the rest of us, thus guaranteeing our eventual extermination?

I just checked in on the end of that lecture: everyone’s eyes have gone silver, and they’re all saying, in unison “We welcome our new tech overlords. Long may they reign!”

Companion is fine. It’s not great, and it’s really not that satirical. It follows the tech based logic of some of the darker Black Mirror episodes, especially Crocodile, which had bad thing result in bad thing necessitating further bad thing all because of the brave new world of tech, meaning lots of murders. There’s not even an ethical discussion argument meant about what it means in the world to have people buy, exploit, abuse these creations, because the focus is on plot machinations constantly moving forward, and really maybe this wasn’t the forum for that.

Does make things feel a bit glib, though.

It was enjoyable enough to watch, for something with so much murder in it.

7 times I suspect these companions are here for a good time, not a long time out of 10

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“ You're right. I do know you. I know everything about you. I know you take almond milk in your coffee. I know you like your bedsheets untucked. I know your favourite hobbies are bar trivia, video games, and prattling on endlessly about everything the universe owes you. I know that you always need to be in control. I know that you have a below average-sized penis. And I know that you think that having a few million dollars will disguise the fact that you are just a sad, bitter, weak human being.” – ouch, someone must have put her sass setting up to ‘kill’ - Companion

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1262012697/