‘I bought you mail order, the perfect companion’: Companion (2025) Review
Has anyone else noticed how a lot of films recently have focused on sexual assault against women at the hands of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity? Take, for instance, last year’s fantastic film The Substance, which saw Dennis Quaid literally chewing the scenery as vulgar, sexist television studio exec Harvey (whose name I’m sure was just randomly drawn out of a hat and bares no relation to that terrible real-world Hollywood exec whose name suddenly escapes me… hm, I think it rhymes with Feinstein…), who coldly fires Demi Moore’s character Elisabeth Sparkles due to her, in his opinion, losing her attractiveness with age, only to hire her younger (and therefore more attractive to Harvey) alter ego, Sue, played by Margaret Qualley. Or, as another recent example, look at Soderbergh’s middling thriller Presence, which, without spoiling too much, features a character who drugs and manipulates young women into having sex with him, eventually murdering them. Another example would be Robert Egger’s recent reimagining of Nosferatu. Or for a small screen example, look no further than the divisive (though, in my opinion, fantastic) 2024 limited series, Douglas is Cancelled, by former Doctor Who and Sherlock showrunner, Steven Moffat.
The point being that the film and television industries seem to be increasingly producing work which deals with themes of male perpetrated sexual violence, harassment, and misconduct — and the question is why? Obviously, it must partially be figured in response to the #meToo movement of 2018 which saw women across the television and film industry publicise their experience of sexual misconduct at the hands of male colleagues who abused their positions of power (most notably amongst them Weinstein). However, the question really is, why now? Why 6 years later? Is this Hollywood, now that Weinstein is behind bars, genuinely reflexively saying sorry for the abuse it allowed to be perpetrated on its watch, or is it just virtue signalling, hoping that a show of its social conscience will translate into critical and commercial success, all the while, not really learning any lessons, and allowing the same kind of abuse to continue? To British readers, this is a story we know all too well: look at how the BBC, the same broadcaster who defended notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile in his lifetime, sought to win brownie points through the broadcasting of the docudrama The Reckoning starring Steve Coogan in October of 2023, only for it to be revealed a month later that they had enabled Huw Edwards to perpetrate, albeit not as extensive as Saville, but still horrendous child sexual abuse.
That being said, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the individual artists behind these projects — The Substance’s director Coralie Fargeat and Moffat do seem to be using their art to make a genuine and meaningful social commentary and critique of the abuse that is perpetrated behind the glitz and the glamour. I just worry that Hollywood, as it is so wont to do, will spectacularly (in a Debordian sense) affect these principles to profit. We saw this so memorably with Greta Gerwig’s 2023 Barbie — ‘a plastic attempt at feminist filmmaking’ as one reviewer put it, allowing Mattel and Hollywood the chance to affect principles of feminism for monetary gain, despite their entire history to the contrary (very minor mentions were made in the film of how Mattel had created unrealistic and harmful beauty standards for young women through the Barbie doll line, for instance). It grossed over a billion at the global box office.
Another way of reading this tendency within modern cinema of dealing with themes of male perpetrated abuse is as a response, not just to the now 7-year-old hashtag of me too, but to a new brand of toxic masculinity, misogyny, and anti-feminism promoted by the so-called manosphere, which has gained traction outside of the ivory tower of Hollywood, and in daily discourse, both online and otherwise. Key influencers of the manosphere include the likes of Andrew Tate (still currently under investigation for sex trafficking and sexual intercourse with a minor) and Conor McGregor (who was convicted of sexual assault in a civil rape case in 2018, lest we forget). As this brand of masculinity gains ever increasing prominence, and as Trump — who likewise was convicted of sexual assault in a 2023 civil rape case — takes over office again, cultural output seems to be warning us of the dangers of misogyny, not just by those in positions of power, but also from people we meet in our day-to-day lives. A recent example that comes to mind is Netflix’s hit miniseries Adolescence.
2025’s Companion, the feature debut of director Drew Hancock, and written by the same team who wrote Barbarian, is another such example — albeit with a sci fi twist to its social commentary, akin slightly to The Substance.In fact, the film even features Dennis Quaid’s son, Jack Quaid (who you’ll probably recognise as Hughie from Amazon’s hit superhero show The Boys), playing a parallel toxic masculine asshole just like his dad in The Substance. And though Quaid as the film’s antagonist, Josh, is phenomenal, the real standout of the film is Sophie Thatcher. Hot off the heels of the 2024 Hugh Grant horror film Heretic, Thatcher gives an immense performance as Iris — a woman who slowly becomes aware that she is an android. See, the premise of Companion, is that Josh and his hopelessly devoted girlfriend Iris venture out to a sleek, remote mansion for a weekend getaway with Josh’s friends. However, it is gradually revealed to both the audience and Iris herself, that her unwavering obsession with Josh (sex on demand, a constant need to be near and compliment him) is not in fact natural head-over-heels attraction, but one that was programmed by him. Iris, an anagram of Siri, is actually an android, a literal mail-order bride, arriving packaged in a massive box to Josh’s one-bedroom apartment. Quaid, explaining in an interview with Collider about his prep for playing this character, described Josh ‘as a villain who doesn’t know he’s a villain. Like, from his perspective, he’s the hero of the story […] Josh is a guy who has not heard the words “I love you” that much in his life if at all and I think that motivates him to do really despicable things and as soon as I clued into that like I think he’s one of the most insecure characters I’ve ever played’. Quaid elaborates by saying ‘he’s at a real low point in his life and I think the reason why he purchases Iris in the first place is […] from a sense of loneliness. I think he’s a really lonely character […] There’s a lot of delusion. I worked a lot with delusion because I think that Josh thinks he’s John Cusack in the 80s […] I think he thinks of himself as a romantic, he thinks of himself as a good guy which is a red flag.’
The revelation comes to a head after Iris is nearly sexually assaulted by a Russian mafioso, Sergey, (played by Rupert Friend), who Josh and co were planning to have Iris kill so that they could steal his wealth. After Iris kills Sergey in self-defense, Josh reveals to her that she is an android, leading her to understandably retaliate against Josh and his friends, especially when they plan to decommission her after their heist plan goes wrong. Rather than have Josh as a protagonist against the raging android, Hancock reverses the roles, placing us in Iris’s shoes with Josh and his friends as the menacing, albeit relatively incompetent, antagonists hunting her down — we empathise more with the young female android victim than we do with her human (mostly male) abusers. In fact, the progression of the film is centrally about Iris redeeming that sense of self-worth after being mistreated and abused for so long unknowingly. It is about the regaining of self worth after being the victim of abuse.
However, the android allegory doesn’t just double for a toxic relationship prone to emotional abuse and gaslighting, but also as a commentary on our relationships with burgeoning technological innovations, particularly AI companions and chatbots. Recognition theory, the idea that the glue that holds our societies together is the desire for affirmation, validation, and recognition of our identities by our peers, as pioneered by Hegel and Rousseau to name a few, is becoming increasingly important as AI chatbots offer a source of non-human recognition — just earlier this month Mark Zuckerberg explained how Meta is making “AI friends” to supplement human friends, saying “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.” AI girlfriends are no longer a thing of future-facing sci-fi, but a present day reality — touted as a way to combat the loneliness epidemic. Two years ago, Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing declared its love for a tech journalist and urged him to leave his wife (wish I was joking)…and there have also been cases of AI chatbots sexually harassing people.
Companion is a clever piece of speculative fiction which uses its double analogy to critique current gender roles: it doesn’t really matter that Iris is an android, as the film shows in the case of the character Kat. The only other female character in the film, essentially serving as a foil to Iris, Kat is an actual human who is equally in a controlling relationship with Sergey, and is also implied to have some romantic history with Josh. When Kat tries to leave with her cut of the cash money, and rebuffs Josh’s advances, Josh orders a second android, Patrick, to kill her. The implication of course being that men like Josh already see women as possessions, objects, and not as real people of their own with their own thoughts, motivations and desires — subservient digital girlfriends will only make worse this already evident trend in real world gender roles (in fact, a 2019 UNESCO study found that female-voiced AI assistants like Siri and Alexa perpetuate gender stereotypes and encouraged sexist behaviour, reinforcing women as obliging, docile, and eager-to-please helpers that ought be available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command).
Also, just as an addendum, though I haven’t seen it directly referenced by any of the cast, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Roxy Music’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heart Ache’ off of their seminal 1973 album For Your Pleasure while watching Companion. The story of an entitled privileged man in an exuberant, albeit remote, mansion, in love with his inflatable doll does sort of track perfectly to this film — especially when Ferry sings:
‘I bought you mail order
My Plain wrapper baby
Your skin is like vinyl
The perfect companion’
Both Companion and Ferry seem to be playing on a Lacanian understanding of phallic desire: a desire that fixates on female objects that it knows can never satisfy it. Essentially, Lacan supposed that all human sexuality depends on the ‘inhuman partner’ — desire tends towards a cold, distanced, inhuman partner, who, importantly for our discussion here, functions like an automaton or machine. In this way, both the narrator in Every Dream Home, and Josh in Companion, are subservient to their dolls: as Ferry sings, ‘My role is to serve you’. As Fisher summarised the Roxy hit: ‘The glam male remained trapped in his perfect penthouse populated by dumb fantasmatic playdolls’ This lonely male resentment/entitlement is summed up in a scene towards the end of the film, when Josh says to Iris, ‘you have no clue what it is like out there in the world. Everything is just a big game and I’m sorry but its rigged against people like me. I’m a good guy, I’m decent. What do I have to show for it? A cramped one-bedroom apartment and a robot girlfriend. I don’t even own you for Christ’s sakes, you’re a rental. […] I deserve so much more than this.’
