Film Review: COMPANION (2025): Sophie Thatcher is Superb in Drew Hancock’s Enjoyable Morality Tale

Companion Review

Companion (2025) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Drew Hancock and starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend, Lukas Gage, Marc Menchaca, Megan Suri, Jaboukie Young-White and Woody Fu.

If the recent animated movie, The Wild Robot, showed the sensitive and helpful side of robots, director Drew Hancock’s smart and fascinating new film, Companion, is the polar opposite as its shows how robots can be manipulated against their will to carry out rather drastic actions. Of course, the human lead character in Companion, Josh (Jack Quaid), is a low life which makes the central robot in the picture the more heroic one. That’s an interesting dynamic which the movie takes on full force as it has Josh eventually face/off with his former robot lover, Iris (Sophie Thatcher has never been better). Both the human and robot have evil tendencies, but Josh is the wickedly dire character who needs to be put in his place for trying to control Iris. This movie is, quite simply, bizarre fun from beginning to end.

This film is tricky in its unreliable narrative as it shows how Josh and Iris supposedly met in a supermarket when some oranges fell on the floor. Hancock focuses on the love between Josh and Iris at the start which is rather iffy in its sincerity. He uses her for sex, and she goes through the motions trying to please him. We don’t know she’s a robot at first and that’s a wise cinematic choice.

When the action of the picture moves to a remote home in the middle of nowhere, we meet Josh and Iris’s “friends.” There is a reason they’ve all come together but it appears to be all in good fun at first glance. We meet an overweight but funny guy named Eli (the terrific Harvey Guillén) who has an incredibly handsome lover, Patrick (Lukas Gage who plays his surprise character to a tee). There’s also Kat (Megan Suri) and her older, married sex partner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), assembled as the movie’s plot slowly unravels.

Sophie Thatcher has an innocuous quality that makes her performance the true standout of Companion. She’s 100% believable as a robot. Thatcher was fine in one of last year’s best films, Heretic, but, here, she’s the main focus of the movie and the reason the picture is always able to maintain audience interest. Jack Quaid, as Josh, doesn’t have much chemistry with Thatcher and that’s a key component as to why this thriller works as well as it does.

While discussing the plot of Companion may seem a bit unfair considering its major twists, it’s essential to know some of the elements of the story that are interwoven into the picture. Josh is driven by money and wants to make a fortune for himself. When Sergey gets rough with Iris, she ends up killing him which complicates the film’s plot and then some. Characters end up getting bumped off as unpredictable situations start unfolding and, though Josh is the central one to blame and is a real SOB, some of the other characters are revealed to be less than noble themselves. Poor Iris must accept her place and be submissive to Josh or try to find a way to defeat him. Let’s just say Josh gets in over his head and makes some bad decisions which give Iris the upper hand.

Initially a story of artificial robotic intelligence, the film soon displays the flip side of what the audience expects as characters end up betraying one another to get their hands on the loot that is hidden in the luxurious home the movie showcases. Thatcher’s Iris is a truly well-written character whether she’s human or not. She becomes the one being abused which shows the sickness of the human mind when it comes to rely on non-human beings to unleash wicked mind games and physical torture techniques. Quaid expertly plays the character who is the villain here, and one won’t help but anxiously await the moment Iris gives him a taste of his own medicine.

Companion is a masterfully constructed and suspenseful look inside the need for control and companionship. Iris, as a character, teaches the viewer the importance of goodness in the world and how to fight back against those who try to unleash evil into the world. Josh, on the other hand, displays the derivation of sadistic human behavior which ultimately serves nobody in a positive way. Greed is one of the most horrible sins to let consume oneself, and the movie shows the morality of Iris’s actions and her admirable character traits that are present within herself even though she is, indeed, a robot.

There are a number of great twists and turns here. Some of the character development gets lost in the shuffle, particularly that of Kat, but the movie is a good time to be had. There are so many surprises in the story line that the concluding revelations are all the more satisfying because just when you think the movie ran out of steam, it reveals itself to have one more trick up its sleeve. Companion never lets up and could make one seek out robot companions rather than human ones. Well, at least for two hours.

Rating: 8/10

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