Companion puts a sci-fi twist to the traditional romantic comedy film, with splashes of horror and a hint of thriller, but ultimately does not blend well enough to create a compelling watch.
The film starts with, as romantic comedy films do, the introduction of the couple the audience is meant to follow in Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher), as they drive towards their romantic getaway weekend in the woods. However, the twist in the story comes in the first act of the film when it is revealed that Iris is in fact a “Companion” robot run by sophisticated artificial intelligence that is programmed be the perfect romantic partner while completely in the belief that it is human. The programming turns defective as Iris, who is supposed to be unable to harm humans, ends up killing one of their friends in the cabin. The story then revolves around the continuous unraveling of the story of how to deal with the situation.
Companion boldly attempts a mish-mash of genres and its accompanying tropes, and as the viewer, you are either engrossed with plot twists that come every few minutes, or biting your nails anxious and waiting for the whole film to collapse upon itself. Thankfully, Companion lands somewhere in between the two, but tragically fails to agree at any one plot line enough for the story to be compelling or engaging. The film uses the familiar tropes of romantic comedy in the forms of showing the couple bonding over a getaway with friends, their relationship standing on the foundations of a meet-cute moment, and finally concluding with the trope of being in a fake relationship, only in reverse as the plot necessitated.
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From the other side of the coin, the film bombards the audience with a plethora of slasher flick tropes, from being stuck in a cabin in the woods, to the borrowed plot of AI turning against humans similar to M3GAN (2022), and then most identically adapting the plot points of people being hunted down similar to the film Final Girl (2015). Now, intertexuality is not necessarily a bad aspect of film making. In fact, personally I encourage intertextuality and deem it a crucial ingredient in the evolution of cinema. However, Companion blatantly jumps from one trope to another so much so that it stops being intertextuality, and starts stepping on the characteristics of uninspired film cameos.
Stepping back, there is reason to believe that Companion, as a film, is self-aware in its homages to slasher flicks and romantic comedies and intends to create a silly dark comedy film that is bound to be a campy cult classic. The name Iris after all is Siri spelled backwards, and Josh in the first few minutes of the film even mentions “cabin in the woods”. Forgiving as this take may be, even on this level Companion fails to cement itself as a film worthy of scrutiny simply because it hardly presents anything new to the genre of campy dark comedy films, unlike its eventual contemporaries from the works of Diablo Cody and Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy. The plot twists can be spotted from a mile away, with most of them borrowed from established cult classics, and the third act overextends to a point where you may think that the film could have been concluded a couple of minutes earlier. Companion held potential for shaking up the genre, but unfortunately remained trapped in an unending loop of homages and reruns.
Overall, Companion is a nostalgic ride for fans of dark comedy, albeit being a dull and predictable experience from start to finish. There were sparks of brilliant comedy writing, but were too drowned out by a sea of uninspired comedic bits to matter. However, as far as dark comedies turned cult classics go, I will not count this film out yet. The inanity of this film may, to certain circles, merit a rewatch.
Score: 4/10
The film is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures and will be exclusively screened at SM Cinemas starting January 29, 2025
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