Companion’s big twist isn’t that its female lead, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), kills her boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), at the end of the movie: she provocatively promises she will in some purring voiceover heard before the rom-com-pink opening credits can even start rolling. The big twist — or at least the first big twist of several to occur in this movie often accompanied by “don’t go in knowing too much” warnings from those who’ve seen it first — is that Iris is a robot unknowingly forced to be the dutiful girlfriend Josh couldn’t manage to score on his own. His murder will occur while they’re vacationing with some foredoomed friends Iris is worried about impressing in a luxe, lakefront mansion very deep in some miles-from-anything countryside. It belongs to a sketchy, decked-in-gold-chains Russian businessman with a ratty mullet (Rupert Friend) whose connection to the group is hard to believe, a characterization also true of more than a few other things in the movie.
Companion is enjoyable enough for what it is: a horror-tinged black comedy pondering what could happen if a “more than a sexbot” so state of the art that she really seems like a person turned against their loser owner. But it shares with Don’t Worry, Darling (2022), another recent thriller that probed how evolving technology can abet incel entitlement, a difficulty stating anything other than the obvious about gender relations in a misogyny-enabling society. (Much of what’s seen here was fresher when the prescient The Stepford Wives was being released almost exactly 50 years ago.)
Companion is, for what it’s worth, much more entertaining than the overly serious Don’t Worry, Darling; it’s generous with twists a packed screening room can make feel extra shocking, and it’s more clever about how it ridicules pathetic male characters you look forward to seeing lose. (I appreciate how much nepo baby Quaid has tacitly acknowledged his inheritance of his father’s punchable grin in the parts he’s taken of late.) But though it’s decently cathartic seeing misogynists who use artificial intelligence to get out of the difficult things of life bitten back by their cravenness, I’m also instinctively turned off by a movie that goes to maybe greater lengths to humanize AI. Companion, written and directed by Drew Hancock, isn’t content being a cautionary tale about the consequences of artificial intelligence’s intrusion into contemporary life. It comes with the implicit caveat that it might not be so bad as long as we treat it with more respect, don’t abuse it — unsettling implications that are unpleasant to hear at a moment in real life where it feels like we’ve reached a scary point of no return.
A wonderfully expressive actress deserving of more than the limited-in-scope horror movies in which she’s mostly starred in her nascent career, velvet-voiced 24-year-old Thatcher is a convincing vessel for Hancock’s thorny ideas. Against my better judgment I wanted this robot who’s pretty much more human than her flesh-and-blood reason for being not to merely be free of the programming she’s enslaved by — which puzzlingly has a setting that allows you to control aggression as if it were as harmless as eye color or vocal timbre — but free to wander the world. When she inevitably does, Hancock positions it like a positive and not a threat. Thatcher’s good enough to make you cheer before thinking twice.
Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun in Love Me. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.
In the post-apocalyptic Love Me, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun respectively play an electronic buoy and a satellite who one day catch wind of each other and, using the now-extinct human race-related knowledge stored in their hardware, together attempt to experience long-gone humanity, then romance, for themselves. On account of the buoy’s fascination with influencers, the two roleplay in an apartment they’ve collectively imagined as a YouTubing couple that had years ago been über-popular for their Cheugy, Blue Apron-sponsored lifestyle vlogs. But the new universe they’ve devised, which the film initially animates in a Bitmoji-like style, ends up coming with many of the existential problems technology isn’t meant to endure. The buoy becomes so preoccupied with her performance as an easygoing girlfriend that she becomes basically suicidal upon realizing that she doesn’t know who she is outside of her pointless persona. The satellite, in addition to wanting to drop the mutual charade entirely, would also like to see more than what the walls in which he’s constricted allow.
Marking the feature debut of husband-and-wife filmmakers Sam and Andy Zuchero, Love Me is novel for how uniquely it asks age-old questions of the what-does-it-mean-to-be-human, how-will-technology-change-our-understanding-of-humanity variety, and how it puts into relief the fundamental strangeness of influencer content without hamfisted commentary. It benefits, too, from the game performances from Yeun and especially Stewart, the latter consistently (and surprisingly) very funny as her character experiences first-time delights like warm baths or chilly spoonfuls of mint ice cream. (In the scenes where Stewart is pretending to be a basic straight influencer, she particularly put me in mind of Mary Woronov, an actress most associated with her work in the 1970s and ’80s who had a charmingly knowing I-know-this-is-ridiculous glint in her eye while nonetheless giving great performances in movies sometimes beneath her asking her to do silly things.)
Love Me can’t fully work unless we become invested in its unlikely romance. The trouble is is that it’s hard to. Stewart and Yeun don’t have much chemistry; the premise, as much of a refreshing big swing as it is, functions better as a question-raising machine than it does a place where authentic-feeling emotion can flourish. At least it feels more responsible than Companion in how it goes about kindling robotic sympathy. What exactly is technology supposed to do when the reasons it’s been yanked into consciousness have gone away? Love Me wonders with some pity without going too far in its means of humanization.
Peterson Reviews 