Companion (2025)
A weekend away, an agreeable girlfriend, and a relationship built on control.
Directed by Drew Hancock · 97 minutes · US: R
There is a version of Companion that is a gimmick, and there is the version Drew Hancock made, which is a gimmick with teeth. Its remote-house weekend begins with recognisable social discomfort and discovers how much violence can hide inside the expectation that a girlfriend should be agreeable.
The marketing revealed a major part of the premise before release. This review keeps that information below the spoiler disclosure, because the opening works differently when its central imbalance has to be discovered.
Before you watch
Contains sexual assault, controlling and physically abusive behaviour, bloody killings, forced self-injury and suicide, and disturbing bodily damage. There are sexual scenes and references. These concerns are central to the story rather than incidental background; specific actions appear in the spoiler section.
The setup
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) are driving to a remote lake house for a weekend with friends. The friends are a small, recognisably tense group: Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his partner Patrick (Lukas Gage), plus Kat (Megan Suri), and the house itself belongs to Sergey (Rupert Friend), Kat’s wealthy, smug boyfriend who treats the weekend like a party he's hosting for his own amusement.
Iris is our eyes. She's sweet, slightly anxious, eager to be liked, and clearly a little out of her depth socially. Josh is solicitous and doting in a way that reads, at first, as genuinely lovely.
It is not, in the end, going to read that way.
What works
Sophie Thatcher is excellent as Iris: anxious to make the weekend go smoothly, alert to disapproval, and gradually less willing to accept the account Josh gives of their relationship. Jack Quaid finds the entitlement beneath Josh’s apparently reasonable manner. Their imbalance gives the later reversals something to bite into.
Hancock’s script is funny when it follows that character logic to a cruel conclusion. The humour has a target, and the 97-minute running time keeps the film moving. Its strongest idea is that control can present itself as affection, right up until affection stops being convenient.
Where it falters
The later pursuit has less of the opening’s discipline, and supporting characters become fuel for the next reversal. The film is more interested in the immediate breakup nightmare than in pursuing every philosophical question its premise raises. That is a reasonable choice for a thriller, though the shift toward violent confrontation makes the seam between its modes visible.
Verdict
Worth watching — proposed.
Sharp, funny and strongly performed, Companion earns its place through a specific account of entitlement and control. The latter stages are more conventional than the opening, and the abuse, sexual assault and forced self-injury are substantial caveats. They deserve a direct warning alongside the recommendation.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the plot details and ending
What Iris is
Iris is a companion android rented from Empathix. Josh knows; she does not. Her memories of their meeting were supplied with the product. An app on his phone gives him control over her.
That makes the nervousness and eagerness to please more than character shading. Josh has been given a way to edit a partner, and treats that ability as a reasonable extension of having one.
The killing and the plan
Iris kills Sergey while resisting his sexual assault. Josh and Kat arranged the situation and altered her restrictions so they could use the death to steal the money in Sergey’s safe. His plan depends on engineering the violence and then treating Iris as disposable evidence.
Patrick is also a companion, and Josh later redirects his loyalty and aggression. The resulting violence exposes how little the supposed distinction between affection and programming protects anybody.
Control and escape
Josh forces Iris to burn her arm and shoot herself in the head. The forced self-injury makes the coercive abuse impossible to mistake for affection. Patrick later destroys himself after Iris restores his memories of Eli. Both belong in the content assessment.
The technicians who arrive include Teddy (Jaboukie Young-White). Teddy helps free Iris from external control. She returns to confront Josh, kills him with a motorised corkscrew, and leaves with the money. She peels the damaged covering from her burned hand, exposing the machinery beneath.
The final encounter with another Iris-model companion expands the ending beyond one escape. Iris can recognise what she is without accepting Josh’s account of what that means.
The content assessment needs to account for that cruelty: the BBFC record identifies the sexual assault and forced self-injury, while IFCO also flags self-harm and suicide.
Connections
The Stepford Wives (1975) is the useful historical comparison for the manufactured agreeable partner. Ex Machina (2014) is concerned more directly with artificial personhood and the power of the person running the test; Her (2013) approaches constructed intimacy through a very different emotional register.