Companion is being marketed as a film from the producers of Barbarian, and like Barbarian, Companion is one of those movies that works because it is filled with surprises.
Before we get to Companion, which I mostly liked, I want to empathize with the folks trying to sell it. Movies based on surprising audiences with off-the-wall storytelling beats are difficult to market! For all the complaints about modern trailers—and I’ve heard them all: that they give everything away, that they highlight all the best bits, that you’ve practically seen the whole movie by the time the two-and-a-half-minute preview is over—they exist because audiences have a plethora of options and are unlikely simply to show up for something because someone involved with another picture they enjoyed is on the same creative team.
The best advertising campaign I’ve ever experienced as a filmgoer was that of The Matrix. Maybe you remember the TV spots. They featured a collage of images (gunplay, martial arts, weird robots, Keanu Reeves saying “whoa”) and frequently concluded with Morpheus’s line from the film: “Unfortunately no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” It’s a perfect line, one that works within the context of the film and as a way to sell the film, and one that leaves the rug-pull about 40 minutes into the movie intact. After earning that critical mass of early viewers, you rely on word of mouth, and word of mouth on the movie was spectacular: The Matrix earned nearly 6.2x its opening weekend gross. (For context: The average “multiple,” as this figure is called, is around 2.7.)
Which brings me back to Companion. This is a movie that’s going to live or die by word of mouth, and I’m pretty curious to see what general audiences make of it. I will endeavor to reveal nothing other than what’s been shown in trailers, but fair warning: some mild spoilers to follow.
The setup is pretty simple: Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are headed to an isolated lakeside home to spend a weekend with some friends. Iris is nervous; she’s convinced that Josh’s friends, particularly the catty Kat (Megan Suri), don’t like her. And it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they don’t: Eli (Harvey Guillen) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) mostly ignore her, the home’s wealthy Russian owner Sergey (Rupert Friend) eyes her like a piece of meat, and Kat complains that she feels as though Iris exists merely to replace her, all the while intimating that she’s not quite what she seems.
Because, of course, she isn’t. Iris is a companion robot—an emotional aid if we’re being nice about it; a sexbot, if we aren’t—and she is controlled by Jack through an app on his phone. Indeed, nearly everything is controlled by an app through phones, cars, and sexbots alike. And this all feels perfectly normal, given how much of our daily life is already controlled by the thousand-dollar microcomputer currently resting in our pockets. The future is closer than we think.
But some things never change. Eternal things, like lust and greed and love. Companion takes a relatively simple premise—what if you had a programmable sexbot and were more or less amoral with how you used it—and runs with it to a (not necessarily the, but a) logical conclusion.
This is why Companion works: it’s both kind of bonkers and entirely internally consistent. Writer/director Drew Hancock has crafted a world that is close enough to our own to be recognizable and stocked it with people who behave in ways that are nominally rational yet completely divorced from common decency. The film’s internal rules—about what these companion robots can do/how they have to act—are (largely) obeyed and everything that happens makes some measure of sense, even when what is happening is horrifying. It’s easier to go off the wall when the wall’s attached to a solid foundation.
It helps that the cast is perfectly appointed. Between this, Heretic, and the Showtime series Yellowjackets, Sophie Thatcher has developed into a modern scream queen; she flips between sardonic and needy and terrified and tough with relative ease. Jack Quaid, best known as the everyman audience surrogate on The Boys, really oozes pathetic smarm as Iris’s owner. And it’s always nice to see Rupert Friend, particularly when he gets to do a silly accent. He’s quite convincing as a decadent Russian billionaire who sees the world as his plaything; he’d fit nicely into the world of Anora.
I hope I have not been too oblique about the pleasures provided by Companion. If I have, allow me to suggest one more joy that might sell you on the movie: it’s just 97 minutes long. All of which is to say that Companion is a wholly original slice of genre fare with gripping, gutsy performances, a number of shocks that always feel earned and never feel cheap, and gets the job done in an incredibly efficient manner. Surely that endorsement is more enticing to most of you than any trailer could be?
On this week’s Across the Movie Aisle we discussed another smaller movie that could use good word of mouth: Steven Soderbergh’s Presence. I seemed to like it more than Peter and Alyssa, but it’s a great example of a film that is both an interesting formal experiment and one that has a tight-as-a-drum script that resolves in an entirely satisfying (at least to me) way. I hope you check it out.
An Unsettling 'Presence'
On this week’s episode, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) discuss the, frankly, bonkers number of nominations received by Emilia Perez. Will the Academy favor it for best picture as a way to stick it to Trump? Then they review
Assigned viewing: ‘Mythic Quest’ (AppleTV+)
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing marketing in the last few newsletters—see above, plus this one on The Toxic Avenger reboot and this one on Better Man (aka, Drug Monkey)—because marketing is the most important factor in getting people to watch something if you don’t have a superhero in your title or Christopher Nolan directing your picture. If people don’t know your thing exists or know about your thing but aren’t given a good reason to see it, then your thing just isn’t gonna get watched until it pops up on Netflix’s home screen.
I mention this because Mythic Quest’s fourth season dropped on AppleTV+ on Wednesday and the only reason I knew it was coming is because I got a text from JVL about it. Despite the fact that I watch AppleTV+ pretty regularly—I just completed a season one rewatch of Severance and have been watching season two each Friday—and have watched the three previous seasons and have even interviewed one of the showrunners, I had no idea Mythic Quest was coming back. At all.
This is a failure of marketing.
So allow me to do Apple’s job for them: Mythic Quest is back! You should watch it! And if you haven’t watched the first three seasons, you should watch them first!
Mythic Quest is a workplace comedy from the team that makes It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia about a company that makes an incredibly popular World of Warcraft-style MMORPG, and it does a perfect job of melding “workplace comedy” with “the insane world of video games.” Ian (Rob McElhenney) is a visionary genius (at least in his own mind) who relies heavily on the programming skills of Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) to bring said genius to life. In addition to navigating the modern workplace, they also have to contend with millions of users and concepts like “time to penis.” (That link is … mostly safe for work.)
Watching the first two episodes of this season was interesting after having talked to Matthew Ball about the state of videogaming, because as season four begins it’s very clear that the legacy, AAA version of Mythic Quest is no longer the company’s primary concern. Rather, there’s a Roblox-style make-your-own-game thing called “Playpen” that has become the company’s most interesting application. And with it come a whole new series of challenges: how to moderate user behavior, how to monetize in-game activities, and how to keep the programmers happy despite the industry contracting in the post-COVID era.
The world is interesting and fairly unique as sitcom settings go, but put that aside: It’s just nice to have all these characters back. Ian and Poppy make a great team; it’s been fun to watch game testers Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim) work their way up the corporate food chain from lowly scrubs to high-powered decision makers; Brad’s (Danny Pudi) corporate sociopathy has been an amusing contrast to David’s (David Hornsby) weak-kneed pusillanimity; and there’s a special place in heaven for Jo (Jessie Ennis), the amoral attack dog who declares loyalty to whichever higher-up is her boss at any given moment.
Anyway, between new seasons of Mythic Quest and Severance, AppleTV+ is easily the streaming service offering the best original series at the moment. If you’ve bought an Apple product in the last three years, odds are you have a promo code for six free months somewhere in your email. I strongly suggest activating it and checking out both shows. You won’t be disappointed.
Really enjoyed Barbarian, so Companion has moved up on my watchlist.
Love Mythic Quest. Charlotte Nicdao at the center of a Tina Fey show has been my dream since the first season