Drew Hancock (Warner Bros (UK and US, on general release))
Arriving at a house in the country, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) isn鈥檛 sure she is welcome. The owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), is leery; his wife, Kat (Megan Suri), is unfriendly. It isn鈥檛 Iris she dislikes, Kat later admits, it is 鈥渢he idea鈥� of her: she makes her feel redundant.
Iris鈥檚 boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is patient and encouraging, but even he finds her shyness and clinginess hard to bear. 鈥淕o to sleep, Iris,鈥� he says, and Iris鈥檚 eyes roll up inside her head as she shuts down.
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Maybe Josh shouldn鈥檛 have set her intelligence at 40 per cent that of the average human. But he didn鈥檛 buy Iris for the company. He did so to jailbreak her firmware and use her for dark ends of his own.
Companion, a horror-comedy and Drew Hancock鈥檚 debut feature, neatly alternates between two classic approaches to robots. Some scenes, with a nod to the , scare us with what robots might do to us, while others horrify us with what we might do to our robots.
Fellow guest Eli (Harvey Guill茅n) manages to fall in love with his male robot companion, but he is a bit of an outlier in a movie that is out to deconstruct (sharply at first, but then with dismaying ham-fistedness) men鈥檚 objectification of women.
Are Iris鈥檚 struggles to be free of owner-boyfriend Josh really a stirring feminist fable or something a bit more predictable? Your life experience will probably dictate the side of this fence on which you鈥檒l fall. But I would feel more comfortable if the script hadn鈥檛 had its own intelligence halved, just as it starts to address the issue of domestic violence.
Surrounded by bland, easygoing robotic 'companions', will we come to expect less of people?
Quaid is a decent comic actor, but he is more than capable of letting the smile drop and going dead behind the eyes as needed. Companion, though, requires him to turn on a penny, from doting boyfriend to snivelling incel, and without much justification from an increasingly generic plot. He does what he can, while Thatcher brings a vulnerability to Iris that, in what is ostensibly a comedy, is sometimes quite shocking.
Peeling away from the sexual politics, I found myself thinking too much about the logic of the plot. In the first half, one little illegal tweak to Iris鈥檚 firmware sets off a cascade of farcical and bloody accidents that ask good questions about what we want robots for. Surrounded by bland, easygoing 鈥渃ompanions鈥�, will we come to expect less of people? Assisted, cared for and seduced by machines, will we lower our requirements for conversation, care, comradeship and love?
Alas, all this is left hanging. It鈥檚 a pity. There was much to play for here, and over 100 years of great fiction to draw on (Karel 膶apek鈥檚 play R.U.R. introduced the world to the word 鈥渞obot鈥� in 1921).
But I may be taking it all too literally. After all, there will never be an Iris. The robot as we commonly conceive it (a do-everything omnibot) is simply paradoxical: anything with the cognitive ability to tackle multiple variable tasks will be able to find better things to do 鈥� at which point they will cease to be drudges and become people.
Iris was very clearly a person from the first scene, which makes the film鈥檚 technology a non-starter. It may look like some dystopia that has embraced slavery, but however you look at it 鈥� as a film about robots or a film about people 鈥� Companion seems determined to chase straw men.
Simon also recommends鈥�
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Amazon Prime Video
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) visits tech bro billionaire Nathan (Oscar Isaac) to assess the humanity of fembot Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Alex Garland鈥檚 superbly claustrophobic three-hander.
Kazuo Ishiguru (Faber)
Klara, a solar-powered 鈥渁rtificial friend鈥�, recounts her life in service to a sickly girl hardly less exploited than she is.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on X @simonings
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