Companion
[4K/Digital Code]
There’s only one group of movie fans more annoying than musical fans and that’s horror fans. They’re almost exclusively the same people who are overly obsessed with Halloween. A sad lot, really, because you’re basically reducing a movie to jump scares, or tropes within tropes. What’s the best scary movie released in recent years? Midsommar? Give me a break. Give YOURSELF a break and read a book.
Which is why, I gotta say, bravo, Companion. You did it. You didn’t knock it out of the park, but you did a pretty great job considering what you were up against.
I loved a lot about Companion: the concept, the plot, and particularly Jack Quaid who delivers an overly complex, yet fun, performance. He’s the nepo baby of the moment! Get him and Margot whats-her-name in a movie together. Maybe I didn’t approach Companion as a “horror” movie which is why I enjoyed it so much. But I was definitely on board with the events as they were unfolding: they were interesting and smart and I wanted to see how it was going to end up. This is a good movie.
Companion would have been better if they didn’t lean into the fact that Iris is a robot as such a reveal. Your fucking poster gives it away, so why wait 30 minutes to build that up as a twist? We all know it! Get on with it! Also, their choice for Iris is…odd to say the least. I don’t know what it is about Sophie Thatcher but her screen presence is off somehow and her delivery kind of…wooden. I know that’s kind of the point of a robot, but then again, when a certain other person is revealed to be a robot it comes as more of a shocker because…they’re not as “weird” as Iris? Bad vibes from that gal, man. Finally, the best person in this cast is Quaid, and it was maybe overkill to escalate him from a dumb misguided horny guy to a straight up evil (with capital E) antagonist. Not everyone has to be a James-Bond-esque villain to be bad, man.
But yeah, I daresay I recommend Companion. It’s got larfs and chills, but no real scares. Just buckets of blood. Yay!
