Girl meets boy. Boy is charming; girl falls head-over-heels. Boy invites girl to a remote house in the middle of the woods for a romantic get-away. Bad move, girl: anyone who’s caught a few recent thrillers knows that this tried-and-true premise soon devolves into a bloodbath. How the female protagonist manages to get away from the get-away shapes the essential intrigue of flicks like Ready or Not (2019) or Fresh (2022). These biting thriller-comedies remix traditional love story tropes in order to capitalize on ready-made themes of exploitation, abuse and the hazards of modern-day dating. (The scene, apparently, is simply rife with nutcases and serial killers.) Drew Hancock’s flimsy sci-fi thriller Companion is the newest addition to the pantheon, and that is probably the only superlative that could be deployed to describe this stale entry in the canon; the film’s twists, tropes and themes come neatly pre-packaged and pre-digested. There is a tinge of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022) here, and a whiff of Promising Young Woman (2020), but the film reenacts none of the incisive social satire or snappy humor of its predecessors, and its commitment to gore feels rote and emotionally vacant. It’s not as if Companion crashes: that would imply that there’s some heft, some gravity, to this weightless fiction.
If you’ve watched the incredibly revealing trailer for Companion (seriously, what’s up with that?), you’ll already be aware of the film’s primary plot twist. Even going into the movie blind, the main curves of the tortuous plot are eminently guessable. When surprises do materialize—there are some clever scenes which shrewdly leverage previously-established exposition—they tend toward the inconsequential: we’re already familiar with the broad strokes, and so the little splashes don’t shock much. Take a look at the film poster, featuring protagonist Iris (Sophie Thatcher) wearing a pink ensemble and a perfectly-coiffed hairdo. She’s smiling, but, eerily, her eyes are perfectly white. Perfection is a veneer—a symptom of restriction, or vice versa. There’s trouble in paradise, we sense, and sure enough, Iris’ boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is predictably jerkish from the get-go, dismissing Iris’ anxieties about meetings his friends, bristly Kat (Megan Suri) and lovebirds Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) at a lakeside “cabin” (read: mansion) owned by the roguish, mustachioed Sergey (Rupert Friend). “Don’t be all mopey and weird,” Josh tells Iris. “Just remember to smile and act happy.” But, as we suspect, there’s much to worry about: Iris falls prey to Josh’s ruthlessly mercenary schemes, and soon there’s blood on everyone’s hands, as well as on the floor.
Throughout the film, Iris arduously escapes from the chokehold of male fantasies and the power dynamics therein. But the film seems programmed to elide all thorny potentialities which might throw characters together in generative, rewarding ways. One of the other vacationers shares somewhat in Iris’ predicament, but the two only trade a few lines of tepid dialogue. It’s as if Companion is intimidated by its ensemble cast, swiftly dispatching each character as soon as his or her plot usefulness withers. Each actor adds only the barest, most tentative thematic or emotive ingredients to the communal pot. Thatcher and Quaid handle the material skillfully enough, but what material there is to work with is largely insubstantial and inert, a series of set pieces dragged from the dusty closet of timeworn sci-fi tropes. Josh’s motivations aren’t propulsive enough to compel his ludicrously poor decisions, and the film’s premise allows it to circumvent its duty to flesh out its main character’s personality, backstory and identity. Iris remains thinly-sketched throughout. There’s not enough emotional rawness to the character for Thatcher to tap into her considerable talents. No scream queens here. Such an absence, an airy convenience of a character, underscores how oppressive gender norms and manipulative relationships rob victims of agency and self-determination. But this thematic throughline trips the film into a bit of a narrative catch-22: Iris’ impassivity means there’s not much to root, or feel, for.
Is director Drew Hancock acting the provocateur? The film’s snappy, incongruous cuts, as well as its light polemicizing, seem to suggest so. But its meat-and-potatoes feminist satire doesn’t actually provide much to chew on. Hancock only re-represents a power struggle that’s been better interrogated in other films, works whose acid tartness feels critical and sincere rather than fabricated. At a brisk 97 minutes, it’s not as if there’s much fat to trim from this breezy production, and there’s plenty of sinister details scattered throughout that might merit a rewatch. But Companion feels overly manicured instead of stylish—it’s not twisted enough, not bizarre enough, not genuine enough, and certainly not fresh enough. Its intelligence is all too artificial.