'Companion' review: Imperfect, but entertaining thriller with AI twist

Jack Quaid and Sohie Thatcher in "Companion." Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
PLOT During a rustic vacation, a young woman discovers a shocking secret about her identity.
CAST Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage
RATED R (strong violence, language and sexuality)
LENGTH 1:37
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE An imperfect but entertaining thriller with a technological twist.
Her name is Iris, and she’s the kind of girl certain guys dream of: Pretty, sweet, sexy, acquiescent. As the heroine of Drew Hancock’s "Companion," Iris (Sophie Thatcher) seems in fact a bit needy, especially considering that her dorky boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is not exactly a catch. Josh’s idea of pillow talk is a brusque "Go to sleep, Iris."
If you haven’t seen the trailers for "Companion," here comes a spoiler: Iris is not a girl at all. She’s a fembot — that’s the classy term, at least — manufactured by the Empathix corporation. She and Josh met cute at a supermarket and fell in love, or so her memories tell her. But during a vacation in a remote cabin, Iris will learn the horrifying truth about herself, and in a horrifying way.
"Companion" works better the less you know of its plot, so here’s a very general outline. Josh’s prickly friend Kat (Megan Suri) is dating a rich guy named Sergey (Rupert Friend, playing a cartoon Russian sleazeball), who invites them to his rustic mansion. Tagging along are a cuddly gay couple, fun-loving Eli (Harvey Guillén) and dreamy Patrick (Lukas Gage). A night of drinking is followed by a very bloody killing, and nonhuman Iris is set to take the fall. As her so-called friends turn on her — and each other — Iris' only hope for survival is to develop a mind of her own.
"Companion" arrives a little late to the AI thriller trend, well after 2014’s "Ex Machina" and 2018’s "M3gan" (not to mention 1984’s "Blade Runner," still the genre’s "Citizen Kane"). What writer-director Hancock does a little differently is to put us directly in the shoes of an AI being. "Companion" is told almost entirely from Iris’ point of view (save for a few expositional scenes), and we come to regard her as a better human than the ones she was designed to serve.
Her original programming forbids lying or causing physical harm, but these noble qualities only make her easier to exploit. When Iris gets a glimpse at her personal settings — eye color, voice pitch, etc. — she’s insulted to find that her intelligence has been capped at 40%. (She cranks it up to 100, of course.)
The philosopher John Searle has been arguing since at least the 1980s that AI is merely an increasingly sophisticated illusion; computers won’t ever have minds, psychologies or sentience. He’s probably right, but where’s the fun in that? Disable your logic for 90 minutes and "Companion" will reward you with some clever twists, delicious ironies and a heroine you can root for — real or not.
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