*Companion*’s Robots Aren’t Believable. That’s a Good Thing.

The targets of domestic violence are human.

Drew Hancock’s Companion looks, early on, like it’s going to be a twisty heist film about AI ethics and dangers. Underneath that attractive costume, though, the film’s chassis is a less polished but sturdier narrative about domestic violence, with programming that owes more to rape-revenge than to SF or suspense.

(I don’t think the twists are actually all that central to the storyline, but if you are a no spoiler sort, you should be warned that there are going to be a lot of spoilers here.)

The film opens with Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and her geeky, slightly pushy boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) driving out to the opulent lakehouse of their rich friend Sergey (Rupert Friend) and his girlfriend Kat (Megan Suri). They’re also joined by blissful couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lucas Gage.)

Sergey attempts to rape Iris, and she murders him in self-defense—at which point we find out that Iris is in fact a robot companion. Josh hacked her programming to make her able to harm humans, and he and Kat set her up to stab him so they could abscond with Sergey’s considerable fortune. Josh plans to shut Iris down and wipe her memory, but she escapes. Things escalate from there—especially when Josh seizes control of Patrick, who is also a robot, and turns his aggression up to 100%.

Again, there are a lot more twists and turns as the plot plots along, and a good bit of clever writing around the rules that govern the robots (Iris can’t tell a lie, for example.) But while Hancock has fun with the programming, he never really treats Iris as a computer, or as nonhuman. Predecessors in the sexbot subgenre, like Ex-Machina and Her focus on the experience of the male protagonists and emphasize the otherness and difference—good or bad—of the female characters. In Ex-Machina you never really know what’s going on in the android’s head; in Her you eventually learn that the android is beyond human comprehension. To the extent that AI in these films serves as a metaphor for women, women are other—the object of the gaze, not the subject.

That’s very much not how Companion works. Iris initially doesn’t know that she’s a robot, and is opaque to herself. But that lack of self-knowledge makes her more, not less human. She’s in an abusive relationship with a controlling turd who takes her for granted, condescends to her, is selfish in bed, and generally blames her for his own considerable failings. Escaping him is a torturous process, involving, among other things, switching her intelligence back on (literally and metaphorically), and painfully learning to refuse his orders and her own (false) memories of their love.

In short, the AI metaphor peels off very quickly, like the flesh off of Iris’ appendage after Josh forces her to hold her hand over a flame in an ugly scene of obvious, open, domestic violence. What’s left when the tropes are gone is Josh’s more and more apparent misogyny, egotism and cruelty and Iris’ accelerating recognition that his control of her is not love but abuse. The real touchstones here aren’t Her and Ex-Machina but films like Alice, Darling or 2020’s Invisible Man—movies, in other words, about gendered violence, false consciousness, empowerment, and (maybe) revenge.

The film’s refusal to be a sexbot movie functions as a critique of sexbot movies, and of the way that we are so fascinated with stories of servile robots in love. Companion never doubts that Iris is a real person; it never doubts that her story is her story; it insists that when Josh treats her as less than human, that’s a flaw in him, not in her. The pretense that she’s a thing is an ideological justification for harming her. The unreal thing is not Iris, but the elaborate plot designed to convince Josh, and you, that she isn’t.

That plot is the film itself, in some sense; Companion functions in some ways as an impassioned argument that Companion, the film, shouldn’t exist. Distancing domestic violence through the tropes of thrillers and SF, robots and twisty reveals, is in its own way a form of dehumanization—a process of turning real pain and real violence into a fun genre romp.

At the same time, though, the movie’s blunt refusal of those tropes—the way it just insists first, last, and in the middle that Iris is a person, not a robot, no matter the ostensible high concept—feels like a necessary, and even courageous, intervention. In Companion, the real machine is patriarchy. The goal of the film is to make that machine dismantle itself.