Starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid

Written and Directed by Drew Hancock

New Line, in cinemas now

A weekend getaway at a remote lake house turns to bloody chaos, following the revelation that one of the guests isn’t quite what they seem.

Ahhh….February in the movie theatres.

Do you want the Good News or the Bad News?

The Good News is that it’s awards season, so even the multiplexes are filled with classy, intelligent cinema. Lots of amazing acting, profound subject matter, sumptuous production design, and films, which just by saying you’ve seen them, can make you appear clever, sophisticated, classy. The Bad News is that quite a few of them are overblown pretentious guff which you sit through out of a sense of duty rather than actual enjoyment.

So, perhaps in a spirit of artful counter-programming, skimming under the awards radar, comes Drew Hancock’s super smart, deliciously funny, intermittently violent sci-fi thriller, Companion, which won’t be troubling any of the judging panels, mainly because their noses will be so turned up, I shall leave it to you to imagine where they might conclude their journey.

Okay, so just in case you haven’t seen the trailer, you might want to ‘leave the room now’, to avoid a spoiler that the movie itself holds on to for most of its first act.

Josh (Jack Quaid, looking not only like his father but also uncannily like Jay McGuinness of Wanted and Strictly Come Dancing fame) is taking his new girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) for a weekend by a remote lake with his friends Kat (Megan Suri), her Russian millionaire boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend dialing his performance up to eleven), along with their loved-up gay buddies Patrick and Eli (Lukas Gage and Harvey Guillén). The catch is, Iris isn’t human at all, but a ‘companion’ robot, ‘devoted’ to fulfilling Josh’s every emotional and sexual need. Although, initially you wouldn’t think so, she just appears to be that little bit too needy, that little bit too much of an emotional doormat… although we have been given a heavy clue that this will be going somewhere very dark indeed.

Twenty minutes in, and anyone who has seen Humans, Black Mirror (Be Right Back), M3gan, The Artifice Girl, Ex Machina, Subservience, Blank – i.e. me – will think they know exactly where this is going, so it’s to Drew Hancock’s eternal credit that he has succeeded in weaving an intriguing, twisty thriller that surprised me at pretty much every turn, was satisfyingly violent, and waited the best part of twenty minutes to reveal itself for the smart comedy of gender bad manners it really is.

At which point the less said about what follows the better.

It would be easy to dismiss Companion as yet another ‘ho-hum’ A.I. B-Movie, but while it definitely has B-Movie sensibilities, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a terrific, intelligent, zeitgeisty exploration of how the A.I. revolution that commentators are so aerated about at the moment, is, like all man-made creations, just an expression of human fallibility itself.

Verdict: This weekend, as you ponder whether to spend three and a half ‘gimme-an-Oscar’ hours in the company of an angsty architect, or less than half that time being entertained, teased, and perhaps even challenged, by the smartest of movie storytellers, you know which one I would heartily recommend. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com