Companion – Ex Machina Meets Anora

This must be the worst marketed film I’ve seen in a while.

The posters proclaim proudly that this movie is by the makers of Barbarian, but they never even bothered to release that movie here in Finland. Also, they mention Notebook. I wonder whether there’s something lost in translation. Was there sarcasm in the original version which isn’t obvious from the Finnish text? I guess they do manage to kind of keep the real theme of the movie secret and I guess I just spoiled that in the title. Sorry.

Anyhow…

We are somewhere in the near future. Iris is going away with her boyfriend, Josh. They are meeting Josh’s friends at a remote cabin. Iris is anxious about the whole thing and there seems to be something off in their relationship. Iris is very devoted, but Josh is kind of distant. He advices her to just smile through the whole thing and she follows. Next morning she goes down to the lake, but Josh refuses to go with her using his hangover as an excuse. Down there, she is joined by Sergei, the owner of the house. He explains to her that his girlfriend is fine with this and has given him permission, so he goes ahead and tries to sexually assault her. When she resists, he attempts to strangle her, which leads to her stabbing him.

Now, before I get to the real spoilers, I would like to say that while the movie is in some ways very stupid. For example, the writers seem to think that Ivy League grads are the pinnacle of intelligence, when that includes people like Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz (both graduated from Harvard Law) as well as a bunch of people who wouldn’t even get in without their parents basically bribing them in. Also, because the writers don’t really understand certain things, that supposedly genius person par with the Ivy Leaguers can’t even calculate basic percentages.

Despite this, the movie is pretty fun. It is nowhere near as good as Anora or Ex Machina, but those are actual top of the class, so it’s fine not to be on that level. This is kind of horror comedy after all and our expectations for those are lesser anyhow. Sophie Thatcher is charming as Iris and plays a difficult role with subtlety that’s required here. Same with Jack Quaid as Josh, who plays a character that’s outwardly charming, but kind of an asshole, but just doesn’t feel that he can do that openly.

It is also a pretty interesting movie, but for that you have to go into the spoiler territory.

So, onto the spoilers, but I will keep them light.

So, if you didn’t figure it out from the name of the movie, the setting, the subtle hints in the performances or me just basically telling you, Iris is a robot and we learn this when we move from the first act to the second. Josh has rented her and configured her just the way he likes. He has kept her intelligence low (at 40%), but has also jailbroken her so that he can use her to kill Sergei, as her usual programming would not permit her harming anyone, which is why Sergei felt he could just use her. However, Iris escaped before they manage to reboot her.

They use this very well. Iris can’t lie. She has been programmed not to. So, at one point when she is talking to a cop, she figures out that she will tell him something that she doesn’t want to. She has Josh’s phone, which includes control over her language, so she quickly configures herself to speak only German. Similarly, she can control her voice, so at one point she tunes her voice to sound like that of Josh in order to control his car. In this sense the movie is actually very smart at times.

There’s another smart thing I like. Near the end Josh orders Iris to shoot herself in the head, because he is thinking of humans, but there is no real reason to have all the electronics in there. The company has only audiovisual equipment and WiFi there and the rest of the processors and harddrives are in the torso.

Why Anora? Because Anore is basically in a same situation as Iris. Anora is in love with a rich guy who sees her very much in the same way as Josh sees Iris, just as an accessory. This is even sort of covered in the movie, as Josh’s friend Kat is basically in a same situation with Sergei.

Why Ex Machina? Obviously Iris is a robot, but we are also in a situation where we don’t really know how autonomous she is. She couldn’t pass the Turing test, because she can’t lie, but if you didn’t expect her to be a robot, you might think there’s something off about her, but you wouldn’t really know. However, she is not manipulating anyone. She is just who she is, even though her programming can be changed. She is easily the most sympathetic character in the movie, as planned. I mean, there are points in which she cries and even though we have been told that there is a container of water in her for this purpose, we can’t taste that. We just see the tears.

Here’s a thought: How do you feel, as an actor, that you have specifically been chosen to represent the perfect human? That’s basically what Sophie Thatcher is doing here.

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