Drew Hancock’s 2025 thriller Companion offers a fresh and killer take on gender roles and white male entitlement in an ever evolving world of technology and artificial intelligence. Iris, played by the incredible Sophie Thatcher, is seemingly a regular loving girlfriend, she is committed, loyal, caring, oh and a robot. Companion seeks to push the boundaries of what AI is capable of, flipping the narrative on its head as we begin to question if it is the artificial intelligence itself that should be feared or instead those controlling it.
Companion looks to explore the seemingly normal relationship between Josh and Iris as they go to visit their friends in a remote house far from civilization for the weekend. All is unravelled, or so we are led to believe, however when Iris murders their host, Serge, in an act of self defense. It is from here we learn, alongside Iris, that she is a ‘companion robot’ , an artificial woman designed solely for Josh’s pleasure and programmed to obey his every command, physically, mentally, and intimately. It is soon discovered by Iris that it is in fact Josh’s fault that she murdered Serge, as he altered her settings to make her do so. The movie from here seeks to follow Iris and she now begins to navigate the human world with the knowledge of who she really is and the pain of the betrayal of the man she is programmed to love.
Iris is presented as an emotionally complex character, she feels in ways she struggles to attribute to human emotion or language and often finds herself feeling things very viscerally and physically as they cause sensation beyond just the mental. In ironic contradiction to this, Josh, played by Jack Quiad, despite being human seems to lack any kind of emotional depth or complexity, something you might expect from a single man who has to purchase his own girlfriend. Despite being marketed as a film about relationships and AI, Companion is truly about Iris and her evolution from passive object to active subject as she finds agency in the face of male oppression.
The dynamic between Iris and Josh act as both physical manifestations and metaphorical explorations of complex gender dynamics and the commodification and objectification of female bodies. Companion seeks to delve into female objection in a new and far more direct and literal way, as Iris is in essence nothing more than a physical object, or so Josh would have an audience believe. Josh alters Iris’s settings, adjusting her intelligence, aggression and levels of self-defence in order to allow her to operate for the sole purpose of making him happy and behaving as he desires. We later find out that Iris is purchased by Josh as a way to commit murder and fraud without having to get his own hands dirty, the added bonus seems to lie in his ability to gain sexual pleasure from Iris without her being able to say no. The dynamic explored serves as a telling metaphor for male dominance and control and Josh forces Iris to play as a pawn in his game allowing himself to be absolved of all guilt and blame. Similarly the relationship between them seeks to highlight issues regarding women’s autonomy as it is often curtailed and modified as a way to to fit both societal and individual expectations of what a woman should be.
Arguably, Companion is not a piece of media set to criticise artificial intelligence as a concept like many are claiming it to be but instead is an indictment of the men who abuse it. It wants to less comment on the existence of AI and instead bash the incel-like nature of female ownership and seeing women as programmable and controlled objects. Quiad’s character Josh does not care for Iris as a person but rather a commodity he has conditioned to love him. It is evident that despite her behaviour and impact on Josh’s life, Iris will always be a robot to him. He does not care about her physical body, forcing her to both burn and shoot herself as he demonstrates to both him and an audience that we should not feel empathy for this thing that he only recognises as robotic and false. He even reduces her down to an object directly, as what starts as a seemingly innocent nickname “beepboop” , then later dawns on an audience that this is the noise Iris makes when she is forced to boot down or “go to sleep” . Josh is deluded by his experiences in the real world that he does not believe Iris would ever understand and uses this to justify the fraud and murder he forces Iris to commit, but the same cannot be said for the way he causes Iris to inflict physical harm on herself. Put down truly to a sadistic and sick nature, Josh reduces Iris’s intelligence down to 0% in order to force her to set herself alight and shoot herself in her head, knowing that she will oblige as nothing more than a doll he can play with. His game is quickly put to an end as Iris puts an end to his sick behaviour, but not before making sure he knows that she no longer loves him and will not be his lab rat any longer.
The end of the film offers a hopeful and just ending for Iris, who is now free of Josh’s abusive control and given the gift of free choice as she begins to live her life the way she should have always been allowed, authentically and freely. She allows her robotic hand to show through, as it now becomes a symbol of resilience—a physical reminder of her struggle and survival in a world that operates against her. The irony we find as the movie draws to a close is that Iris ends up being the most empathetic and human character in the entire cinematic piece. Yes she has faults, her robotic hand for instance, but that makes her, ironically, all the more human as she accepts her faults and seeks to live her life because of them. The final scene finds Iris face to face with another companion very much like her, all accept this alternate hers blonde hair is seemingly identical. But as realisation of their similarities dawns on this alternate Iris, we as an audience are left to hope that this woman too can break through the oppressive structures of the companion system, questioning if it is ethical to allow something to feel human and then go on to not treat it as such.