How does one engage critically with Companion, a film that’s chief attribute and function is as a plot twist delivery machine? Even its very premise is merely hinted at in the film’s marketing and doesn’t begin to reveal itself until the end of the first act, with everything we witness up to that point coyly obscuring the exact nature of what we’ve been watching. Were the film really interested in reckoning with the ideas it introduces one might hold their nose, acknowledge the secret at the film’s center, then roll up their sleeves and wrestle with the text, but here each “shocking” upending of expectations is merely paving a path to its next bombshell. It’s the proverbial beach read as cinema; one happily whips through its pages, but there’s not much to cling to. And yet, undeniably, there are superficial pleasures in the confidence with which the film unfolds as seeming incongruities and tantalizingly underexplored ideas are revisited and later expanded upon. Forgive the mixed metaphor, but the film functions primarily as a pot boiler where most of the fun is in figuring out what’s in the pot.
Let’s see how far we can get preserving the film’s mysteries. Companion is being sold as from “the creators of Barbarian,” which is slightly fraudulent — Drew Hancock, this film’s writer-director, had nothing to do with the earlier film and its actual director, Zach Cregger, is but a producer here — but that does level set the ratio of disquieting comedy to horrific violence found here. The film could be described as an askance take on “modern romance,” with a hard stress on the modifier there and much eye-rolling at the romance of it all. But it is first and foremost an updated take on an oft told tale of what happens when a group of friends gather at a remote location where “very bad things” happen. We’re introduced to wide-eyed dream girl Iris (Sophie Thatcher), who has a meet-cute with Josh (Jack Quaid) in the produce department of the grocery store and falls madly in love with him. Some time later, the couple has made plans to spend a weekend at an isolated estate miles from civilization with a handful of Josh’s longtime friends and Iris is already on edge, believing that they all hate her. It’s initially unclear how anyone possibly could as Iris embodies a very narrow kind of perfection: pretty, doesn’t talk too much, is attentive to the needs of others, and is even willing to carry most of the luggage from the car to the house. But sure enough, there’s a decided mean girl snarl to the weekend’s hostess Kat (Megan Suri), while the roly-poly Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his sunswept lover Patrick (Lukas Gage) patronizingly humors her. And then there’s Kat’s older lover Sergey (Rupert Friend, projecting Eurotrash arms dealer malevolence), the actual owner of the house and surrounding lands, who stares at Iris as if she were a piece of meat. After a pleasant evening of drinking and dancing, Iris is unsuccessful in getting a hungover Josh to join her for a lakeside stroll the next morning and instead encounters Sergey, who forcefully indicates his desire to have his way with her. In trying to physically fend him off, Iris buries the pocket knife she surprisingly found on her person into Sergey’s throat, killing him.
Going any further gets into spoiler territory, but let’s just say that Iris is in a highly persuasive state and things aren’t as simple as calling the police and reporting the killing as self-defense. Through machinations best elided, the blood-covered Iris finds herself running through the woods, literally being hunted by her less than altruistic friends, who are desperate to get to her before she can make her way back to the city. And, as is often the case in films like this, once weapons are introduced things start to go sideways and bodies begin to pile up. It should be said that the film makes a sport of toying with the audience’s innate empathy as well as testing the limits of how we perceive consent, self-determination, and what it means to actually love someone — glibly so, and feasting on a steady diet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s recognizably there. Companion ultimately circles back to a battle of wills between Josh and Iris, with the former coming to represent a kind of performative nice guy whose technocratic tendencies — he owns a self driving car and constantly has his nose buried in his phone — and quickness to tamp down Iris’ curiosity reveals the kind of person who values expediency and convenience over actual decency. Companion is part of a recent spate of films that identifies a strain of villainy in smug, know-it-all men overly assured in their own intelligence (including last fall’s Heretic, which coincidentally also centered on Thatcher being lectured to at length), and one of the film’s perverse pleasures is in the steady accumulation of non-lethal injuries suffered by Quaid’s character, who clearly wasn’t built for getting his hands dirty.
It’s also a role that suits the actor alarmingly well. The offspring of Hollywood royalty — his parents being Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan — Quaid the younger has developed into a dependable supporting player in films like Logan Lucky and Oppenheimer as well as, most relevant to this film, one of the masked killers in 2022’s Scream (unlike this film, the statute of limitations on spoiling that film has expired). The actor possesses the rare gift of appearing simultaneously non-threatening while being highly hateable, which Companion smartly accentuates; the character is evil in a way that emphasizes his laziness and entitlement above even his duplicitousness. The film has a rather cynical view of dating and what traits are most desired by a certain kind of low-effort individual — it does not go unnoticed that both Josh and Eli have “outpunched their weight” and that in addition to being more conventionally attractive than their partners, Iris as well as Patrick have a subservient and undemanding quality to them — and the feeling of violation one feels for Iris is largely in response to the invisible box placed around her. As for the beguiling Ms. Thatcher, the actress is tasked with navigating a self-actualization parable with mostly unmovable guardrails; Iris knows Josh is no good for her but she’s helpless to truly reject him (also, as much as she might want to, she can’t bring herself to lie to him). The physical abuse delivered onto her character is less upsetting than the way she’s made to dance on a string, denying her true potential and independent wants for the enjoyment of others. The karmic comeuppance the film is building toward is understandably presented in gendered terms, but in truth it’s about a would-be master of the universe felled by his impatience and his fondness for modern amenities. Quoth Tyler Durden, the things you own end up owning you.
DIRECTOR: Drew Hancock; CAST: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: January 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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