Reviewed by Alicia Glass
A weekend getaway at a remote cabin in the woods amongst several coupled friends turns into a bloodbath of murder, shocking revelations and a fight for ultimate freedom!
Are we really this jaded and far-gone as far as technology and the hunt for a perfect romantic partner goes? The fact that Josh’s pretty little girlfriend is a companion robot isn’t much of a spoiler – it’s in the trailer come on – but what he intends to have Iris do during this weekend getaway amongst his odd friends is. Make sure your companion-bot command module is up to date with the latest – hacked – software, and lets dive into this!
So Josh (Jack Quaid) is taking his pretty little if a bit shy and totes oblivious girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to a weekend vacay at the so-not-a-cabin of their friend Kat’s (Megan Suri) rather rich and super-Russian boy-toy Sergey (Rupert Friend). Along with gay couple Eli (Harvey Guillen) and his longtime seemingly perfect boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage), who sport some compellingly similar secrets of their own, our couples converge at the rather luxurious space Sergey owns out in the woods, for some fun and skullduggery!
Kat seems to dislike Iris from the get-go, and whether that’s because she’s aware of Iris’ real existence as a companion-bot, privately resentful that she has to smarm and sleep with Sergey to have access to all this sugar-daddy stuff, or just annoyed that the only other female presence here happens to be artificial and therefore she can’t really compete with it, remains to be seen. What is known for sure is that, like a lot of foreign men with money and too much testosterone portrayed in these kinds of films, Sergey makes a play for Iris, won’t take oh hell NO for an answer, and it gets his entitled dumbass killed off right quick, by Iris’ own hands.
As horrified as Josh and the rest are at the fact that Sergey is dead, they all seem to be rather upset at Iris-bot for her part in his murder, nevermind the fact that they were planning on using her to commit theft and potential murder too, just y’know, later on in the vacay here. Like, how dare Iris-bot actually defend herself against someone else? And that is one of the main themes of the entire film, with only a thin overlay of the fact that Iris happens to be a robot with the strength of ten or more men, a person (not just a woman, any person regardless of apparent gender) has the right to defend their autonomy, their personhood, from any and all invaders. Especially in this particular instance, from jerkwad boyfriends with remote controls.
After this, things kind of degenerate down into chase scenes, confrontations over what a loser Josh actually is to need a companion-bot from Empathetix rather than actually dealing with human relationships and drama and crap, revelations of the compelling thought that even a companion-bot can learn to love a human and the other way ‘round too, and of course the original planned heist going off with as many hitches as can be possibly thrown into it. The astonishingly selfish entitlement of the main characters, most especially Josh himself, is a particularly charming and delightfully superficial mirror of the political and social upheavals here in the brave new world of 2025, and the movie delights in the brightly colored display of its amazing ugliness. Absolutely no-one is surprised that the character we empathize with the most strongly is of course the killer lady-bot, who acts the most humanely of all of them.
Decide what you’d name your own Companion, available to watch on Amazon Prime now!