Sophie Thatcher makes a great Companion in an otherwise facile horror romp

When Sophie Thatcher made a cameo as a makeup artist in Ti West’s trilogy-capping slasher movie MaXXXine, it felt like a nod to an up-and-coming scream queen, despite the fact that Thatcher had only appeared in a handful of other movies. Her seeming destiny derived less from the cultural imprint of The Boogeyman than Thatcher’s whole deal on Yellowjackets, the horror TV series where she plays a particularly angsty and troubled member of a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash. As that show’s Natalie, and just in general around her piercing eyes, Thatcher has the vibe of a horror heroine who might actually watch horror movies—possibly with gravely serious interest, rather than the trivia-trading mirth of a Scream character. Of course she would do some horror-movie makeup first, at home in the slightly seedy atmosphere. Sure enough, Thatcher soon turned up in last fall’s A24-branded horror thriller Heretic, and now stars in Companion, sold as a companion piece of sorts to the horror breakout Barbarian.

That movie’s writer-director Zach Cregger produced this one, which is written and directed by Drew Hancock. Like Cregger, Hancock has a background in TV comedy—he wrote on Surburgatory; he’s directed for Tenacious D—and brings along a mischievous energy that leaves his movie feeling, at times, as much like a bloody farce as a traditional genre play. Thatcher plays Iris, a young woman accompanying her extremely Josh-y boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) on a weekend-in-the-woods getaway with two other couples: Kat (Megan Suri) and Sergey (Rupert Friend), and Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage). Josh and Iris meet cute at the supermarket in the opening scene, and Thatcher makes a woman who should be too good to be true—wide-eyed, beautiful, affectionate, attentive—seem achingly sincere.

There is, naturally, a reason that Iris has such a dreamy façade coupled with a dreamlike devotion. There’s also a reason that Kat, in particular, looks askance at her, a skepticism that Iris has sensed in the past. (Turn back now if you want to maintain a teaser-trailer level of plot purity; keep going if you can stand a full-trailer revelation that occurs in the first 30 minutes that cannot be ignored in any serious discussion of the movie.) Iris is not precisely human. She is an extremely lifelike robot—essentially an advanced sex doll capable of providing the full girlfriend experience. Capable, actually, of providing even more than that, especially once her settings are strategically adjusted.

To say much more really would venture into spoiler territory, but it shouldn’t ruin anyone’s sense of discovery to note that Thatcher’s performance remains a highlight throughout the film, just as it did in the similarly winding Heretic. In that movie, she played a religious convert trying to balance her serious devotion with her own, perhaps savvier instincts as a woman. Iris the robo-girlfriend has an arguably similar dilemma: She has her programming, yes, yet perhaps a creation that advanced simply can’t be as pliant as its partner-slash-owner needs it to be, especially when she’s faced with another form of hard-wired programming called the stupid human male.

Thatcher’s two big horror movies so far, though, have a way of calling attention to their own cleverness, which in turn accidentally reveals the limits of that cleverness. In the case of Companion, it may not actually be there at all. The film draws its own comparisons to Barbarian, even without the ad hook: It’s also a relatively small cast, in a humor-laced genre picture commenting on discomfiting relationship power dynamics, largely but not entirely set in and around a significant piece of real estate unfamiliar to many of the lead characters. Fair, then, to point out a major difference, and not a flattering one: When Barbarian unveiled a twist, it would require a full reorientation in time, character focus, and daisy-chained thematic concerns; the movie had a giddy unpredictability. When Companion attempts the same sort of twists—turns, really, because they don’t fully recontextualize what’s come before—they’re almost too easy to roll with. Good for a laugh, sure, and able to keep Hancock’s story moving along. But they don’t pierce the screen with audacity, or even hold much shock value. Befitting Iris’ true nature, and unfairly to Thatcher’s performance, the movie often feels like a second-rate carnival ride populated by automatons.

The filmmakers seem to sense that they should be providing more—that Josh, for example, should at least be the second-least programmatic character on screen. Maybe he is by default, and yes, Quaid knows how to put a sweet face on some questionable, entitled behavior. That’s just it, though: Companion’s observations about relationship power dynamics are mostly just Comedy Ex Machina with the faintest hint of Her, neutered with a very Big Studio approach to inherently kinky material. (For the most part, avoiding sexuality as much as possible.) Hancock is more assured with sight gags—Iris slipping out of her captivity in the background of a shot is laugh-out-loud funny—than sci-fi-horror provocation or “satirical” affirmation of social truths, which amount to Companion arriving last on the scene, ready to destroy already-eviscerated Nice Guy desperation. The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.

Director: Drew Hancock
Writer: Drew Hancock
Starring: Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quadi, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Lukas Gage, Rupert Friend
Release Date: January 31, 2025