Companion gives away its big “twist” up front. It’s hinted at on the poster and explicit in the trailer: Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is a robot.
Specifically, she’s a “companion” robot, a perpetually overflowing fountain of earnest, eternal infatuation. Choose a model, select a meet cute, and enjoy.
If the marketing doesn’t try to hide this from the audience, maybe it’s because Companion—despite its glossy social SF exterior and venerable cinematic ancestors like The Stepford Wives, Ex Machina, and AI—is not, at its heart, a movie of ideas.
Instead, it uses ideas. It doesn’t try to make any new points about misogyny, privilege, or entitlement; it doesn’t take the age-old SF conversation about robots and alternate, variable forms of consciousness in any new directions. And because it sticks to familiar, comprehensible, you’ve-seen-this-before notions, it doesn’t have to slow down to explain before it cleverly uses them as obstacles, complications, and motivations.1 The real twist is that this is barely a science fiction movie at all. It’s a funny, energetic crime film. An amazing chunk of it could be the Coen Brothers but with robots.
As far as Sophie knows at the start of the movie, she’s a devoted girlfriend who’s a little jittery at spending the weekend in a luxurious lake house with her beloved Josh’s friends. Josh (Jack Quaid) tries to reassure his “Beep-Boop” that it’ll all be smooth sailing. Kick back, listen to long-time couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) once again talk about how they met. Ignore any barbs from Kat (Megan Suri), whose sketchy boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend) owns the place. Maybe lie out by the lake. Maybe get your programming hacked and your life endangered so you can be a murder weapon in someone else’s half-baked scheme.
Sophie is now in a fight for her life and freedom, while other characters scramble around trying to clean up their mess and salvage a fucked-up plan. There’s a lot of delightful improvisation, and while it’s science fictional in form—switching the language in an operating system, returning to factory settings, etc.—it’s also practical, spur-of-the-moment problem-solving. When Companion is at its best, its cleverness yields a chain of dopamine hits that has me constantly saying, “Oh, fuck yeah! How’s that going to work out?”
It also provides another great pleasure of the genre: criminals who are in way, way over their heads. One of the best laugh-lines comes when a frazzled Josh protests that he’s never had to plan a murder before, and it’s hard, okay? He can come up with some decent ideas on the fly, but he overestimates how much he can control things (bad) and doesn’t know when he’s making assumptions (almost fatal).
The movie also doesn’t neglect the emotional angle, and—in keeping with its general approach—is more interested in love as a real, pragmatic force than a philosophical or moral value. Is love really love if it’s programmed in? Is love really love if it’s messily tied up with ownership and inequality? Companion basically shrugs: it’s not issuing eternal verities, it’s following how this particular group of people will feel and act under pressure. Whether their feelings are real on unreal, or whether they “deserve” the names the characters give them, they’re there, and anyone discounting them does so at their peril.
It’s fast, funny, and clever, and reviews dinging it for lacking thematic heft or ideological insight are scoring a game it never really tries to play. On its own field, it hits a solid triple.
Companion is streaming on Max.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Pitt, “12:00 PM” and “1:00 PM”
Slight step back in quality here after the highs of the last two episodes, but we get a decent resolution to the abortion plot (and it kept avoiding most of the cliches, which was nice) and some inevitable but still emotionally affecting forward movement re: the braindead teenager and his parents. But if the show got points for dodging all the obvious, done-to-death beats of the abortion subplot, it loses points for the are-you-kidding-me-here timing of this miscarriage. (As soon as Collins bought the baby carriage, my wife said, “Oh, she’s going to miscarry,” and she was right. That baby was two weeks from retirement!)
Downside of the “it’s all one shift!” structure: you can pack this many high-drama cases and big twists into a season, but whenever you remember that this is all happening in one day, it gets a little ridiculous. And some of the pacing isn’t well-served by all this, with the energy of the various stories occasionally petering out and losing impact as they go along.
Best parts of these episodes: Mel’s excitement at connecting with the autistic patient with the sprained ankle (there’s such a sense of the happiness and relief she feels at talking to another neurodivergent person, especially in an interaction where she knows how things should go and what she can do to help; she’s completely in her element here) and Langdon genuinely trying to learn from that. The messy legal and moral tangle around Santos’s ladder-fall patient and how vindicated I am. Me realizing that Fiona Dourif really does look just like a younger version of her dad with a wig on.
I read a book of anecdotes from ER doctors last year, and it’s funny to imagine The Pitt doing dix or seven episodes in a row where nothing at all happens and the staff goes insane from boredom.
Justified, Season One, Episode Seven, “Blind Spot”
“You honestly see a way out of this?”
It would be an exaggeration to say this is an episode about Raylan being an idiot, but it’s an exaggeration rooted in truth. I said last week that Raylan’s weakness is women, but it’s actually his more obvious weakness; the eponymous blind spot is him forgetting that sometimes, it actually is about him and what he’s done. Raylan doesn’t have Vic Mackey’s ego, so he falls back on his system for help rather than try to lead everything himself.
But most of this episode is Raylan acting like the dumbasses he chases because he thinks Ava is being targeted and he’s trying to protect her. Snapping at Boyd is some amateur-hour horseshit; even if he was right about someone chasing Ava, as Art points out to him, he would have been the cause of it with his sloppiness. In fact, that whole scene where Art tears into him is great, because Raylan thinks he can spin this into getting transferred out of Kentucky, and Art makes it clear that he won’t ever do that, because that’s not what a professional does, hitting Raylan right in the self-image. Raylan is supposed to be a goddamned professional.
This also dives further into fleshing out the Crowder family, partly through Daddy Crowder showing up but mainly through Johnny Crowder. It’s the closest we get to a system equivalent to the cops; what’s sad about them is that, due to any lack of upward mobility or education, what they have is really the best they can feel about the world. It’s bleakly funny when Johnny rants about being one of the better Crowders due to being a business owner (“I’m the respectable one!”) – people fundamentally want to feel tough and powerful. There’ll always be assholes like the Crowders no matter what economic system there is, but poverty is what makes them gross, petty thieves. What else is a dumb asshole to do?
What I love about Boyd is that he’s simultaneously completely sincere and always performing, making it impossible to get a read on him. There’s an extremely funny failure of the Bechdel Test, where the two main women in Raylan’s life suddenly meet. During the conversation between Raylan and Boyd, there are a lot of very Shield-like shots of Raylan’s eyes and mouth. Ray McKinnon’s hitman writing a book on his career is a very Leonardian detail.
I also feel like writing about this show is massively improving my writing and thinking; I imitate its languid feel and density of ideas, and it’s forcing me to really think again about its construction and moral ideas.
Biggest Laugh: “I know you speak English, I believe it’s one of your proudest achievements.”
Top Ownage: The brutal speed of the home invasion that kicks the whole thing off.
I’d forgotten about that biggest laugh line until you mentioned it, and then I laughed all over again. Definitely had not forgotten about that killer home invasion scene at the beginning, though.
It’s always a pleasure to be watching something that feels like it’s helping you hack your own brain–and I feel like part of the appeal of writing criticism, as someone who also writes fiction, is grappling with how the work can help you figure out and refine your own. Justified is great for that.
Would not want Art yelling at me under any circumstances, and the character even acknowledges that yeah, he likes Raylan, but he’s PISSED and that is taking precedence. “And what did you do? You SCREWED THE WITNESS!”
This show rules at getting a great cast of character actors and That Guys for its guests and recurring criminals, and M.C. Gainey as Bo Crowder is an excellent example.
It’s such a fistpump moment – like the ultimate MC Gainey role, where he gets to play the coolest heavy he’s ever gotten. And he’s also just one of many That Guys in this episode – it’s also got Brent Sexton!
Oh, man, Sexton is great in his role. I wish you were going through this faster so we could get to the really kick-ass seasons!
I loved how Boyd kept persisting towards his observation (which was so obvious if anyone had stopped to think for five minutes) even as Raylan kept getting pissy and missing the point.
And as others have mentioned, Art justifiably losing his shit at Raylan for his unprofessionalism was great. And in contrast to Raylan, even in the dressing down he was completely in bounds and professional, not saying anything that wasn’t true, and not straying into anything unwarranted or personal.
Kojak, “A Hair-Trigger Away” – A cop, working for months on breaking a heroin ring AND with an addict for a girlfriend, accidentally kills his partner, and tries to hold things together. The story doesn’t really hold together – a mob boss angry that his brother was also killed at the drug bust, albeit by a shadier drug dealer, adds unnecessary complications here – but the atmosphere and the the acting are good. (Another Summer in NYC episode, which I suspect means the cast and crew flew east to grind out as many of these as they could in the summer of ’76.) The troubled cop is played by Walter McGinn, who was possibly on his way to bigger successes when he died in a car crash the following year. His girlfriend is played by Lynn Redgrave with a Southern accent for some reason. And other guests include Hurd Hatfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray), a young Morgan Fairchild (as a model, of course), Dan Hedaya, Irene Cara, and Dominic Chianese, already playing mobsters.
Frasier, “The Impossible Dream” – Frasier is bothered and perplexed by a recurring dream he’s spent the night with Gil Chesterton, the very fey and apparently gay restaurant critic for the radio station. This does not lean into gay panic, if it is maybe a bit too quick to dismiss the simple idea that none of us are totally straight (or totally gay), and it ultimately is about Frasier realizing that he misses throwing himself in complex psychological issues. But the best moment is an unrelated scene where Daphne and Martin have fun freaking someone else in the apartment elevator by pretending to be spies. (Also seeing just how Gil reacts to hearing about the dream is very funny.)
NBA Playoffs, OKC vs MEM – Every time Memphis remembers it’s an NBA team, OKC stormed back out to a big lead. But at least Memphis didn’t lose by 50.
Schindler’s List – I think one of Spielberg’s strengths that isn’t spoken of enough is his facility with violence. His career was built on sensational action scenes that translated violence as adventure and he introduced new avenues for more family-friendly violence in the PG-13 rating. Then in Schindler he captures the violence of the Holocaust with the same clarity but in a way only a sadist could enjoy. He’d change the language of onscreen violence profoundly again with Saving Private Ryan, a movie that so thoroughly altered what the public demanded from a war movie that it’s hard to remember that no war movie looked like that before.
That’s just one aspect of this movie which I find staggering in its power, an accomplishment so large it can seemingly only be discussed against its totemic reputation.
Some of us have been banging on about Spielberg’s violence (and in particular his sadism) for years! I think it is tied to his astonishing technical grasp of cinematic language that rarely calls attention to itself as such (like his smooth oners), action is in the edit and violence is in the impact and Spielberg uses both of these with uncanny fluency – as you note, this can be toward more commercially entertaining ends but the principles are indifferent and are just as easily oriented towards atrocity. Which is why his sadism hits harder.
Fontaines DC – Woo live music, etc. I hadn’t really planned on going to this show, but my buddy really wanted to go and he was pretty insistent. So, I don’t get to hang out with him enough and I figured it probably wouldn’t be a bad show, even though I was familiar with, like, four of their songs. Anyway, I had a good time. On record, I tend to prefer the more laid-back / partially-acoustic songs like “Favourite” and “It’s Amazing to Be Young” to the more aggressive bangers like “Starburster” and “Jackie Down the Line,” but seeing them live really unlocks the magic of the latter. Anyway, good stuff.
Might have a pretty high volume of concerts coming up soon and over the summer. Trying to make sure I don’t actually forget any of them.
Woo! Liv— hey…
Princess Mononoke. I watched this with the five year old and she has not had nightmares from it, so big win. Beautiful movie. You can’t do that with computers. Every frame is exploding with life. Watching it with the five year old what really stands out is the extent to which not even the most wicked character is truly evil; they’re either corrupted or acting out of fear, but they aren’t cheaply redeemed either. It’s a story about the rot that sets in when you do bad things for ostensibly noble reasons; you’re forced into the world (which is already cursed) and you can choose whether to make the best of it for yourself or
to rebel against the curse. Also my daughter wanted San and Ashitaka to get married at the end.
last of us part 2. I’m a sucker for revenge plots but also it feels a little heavy handed with the direction it’s going re the hollowness of cycles of violence and reprisal. Also Joel should have considered that maybe someone would come looking for him and changed his name or something.
It seems a lot of people think Joel was wrong for his actions in the season 1 finale? Sorry, but (SPOILERS) in a world with no legal system using force to keep doctors from chopping your daughter’s head open on a lark is correct. (Interestingly, in the remaster of the game it’s clear that the doctors have already killed immune people before and have no clue what they’re doing, but this is left ambiguous in the show). For it to be an interesting dilemma it has to be plausible that the fireflies were making a cure; nothing indicates to Joel or the audience that that’s the case. Sorry Abby. Your dad deserved it. (end spoilers)
The big action scene drew comparisons to GoT; it was better than any of them. Basic things like showing geography and planning are too often skipped.
Gemstones I was joking before but mcbride really is a redneck garcia marquez. Goggins is on god mode this year. Someone is getting ate by a gator.
TLOU is probably the best example of a dumb gamer dilemma. Games like doing this where they give you hard choices like murder a child in order to gain a minor stat bump or rescue the child who is literally a child, (bioshock), enslave sentient robots and murder hundreds of sentient humans, murder sentient robots and hundreds of humans, or do neither of those things (fallout 4), etc. It’s almost like gaming is infected with a fetishization of hard choices—i.e., choices that require sacrificing innocents—as if the sacrifice is that part of the hard choices that makes it effective. Games can be pretty good at giving you no-win dilemmas at certain points (eg, rescue one person or the other), but the ones that build the game around one big dilemma are really bad at it.
You could fix the TLOU season 1 finale “dilemma,” which would then fix Abby’s revenge plot. You would just need some exposition to make it clear that the fireflies are reasonably likely (but not cetain) to succeed in making a cure. Make the utilitarian calculus one that really challenges our moral intuitions.
Also: idea for a video game: Joel Miller visits Omelas.
Oh! one more thing. Mononoke and TLOU pair well because both are about moral rot and the destructive nature of cycles
of revenge and reprisals but in mononoke Ashitaka just says “no. fuck you” to the prospect of rotting. He doesn’t even have a hope for a cure but still just refuses to rot and die.
Programming is rooted in binary and logic gates (IF THEN ELSE), and so I think that seeps all the way down into the storytelling aspects of it. That and movies being a dominate cultural force during the medium’s formative years – how else to be like a movie other than to give you a movie story with Choose Your Own Adventure choices?
You can’t make an omelas without breaking your spirit.
Crime, you say? I am intrigued, I liked Ex Machina quite a bit because of its noirish borrowings.
The noir lean of Ex Machina really boosted it for me too. That’s icy where this is colorful, but it’s interesting that they’re both using a (currently more marketable?) genre to smuggle in another one.
Year of the Month update!
May’s year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
And there’s still time to sign up for any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 1999!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
Okay, this sounds absolutely great and has jumped to the top of my want to watch list. As watching Justified is confirming for me (also Dial M for Murder over the weekend, I love amateur criminals trying to crime and kill experiencing first-hand the maxim “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Oh, I’m so due for a rewatch on Dial M for Murder! And that’s truly a great maxim for all crime plots.
Hey, I’ve actually seen this one! I was pleasantly surprised by the humor through out. It didn’t take itself too seriously, which I like in movies and in people.