Sophie Thatcher is the latest lady robot to go rogue in Companion trailer

“Beautiful woman actually robot” is a time-honored tradition, but surely one we’re going to be seeing a lot more of as our society grapples with the real-life rise of artificial intelligence. Our latest lady robot is Iris (Sophie Thatcher), who announces in the Companion trailer that the happiest moments of her life (so to speak) were the day she met Josh (Jack Quaid) and the day she killed him. 

If you’ve seen movies about AI in beguiling female form (Ex Machina, M3GAN, the recent Subservience), you can probably predict the beats of this trailer. The robot discovers she’s a robot; she goes violently rogue; the humans, in their hubris, underestimate what it takes to contain her; mayhem and murder ensues. But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Quaid promises twists, adding “it’s not necessarily a movie that relies on a big reveal, and every reveal was fresh.” Similarly, director Drew Hancock insists this ain’t like other robot movies: “It’s not A.I. gone wrong, it’s A.I. gone right.”

What does AI gone right entail? Per the Companion trailer, it’s Iris becoming self-aware and fighting for her own agency—boosting her own intelligence and dumping the guy who helped her gain consciousness in the first place. (“Did you jailbreak your sexbot?” A bemused Harvey Guillén asks.) As Hancock puts it, “It’s a movie about self-discovery and, at its core, is a breakup movie about this woman finding empowerment through discovery of self.” It’s also the project that drenched Thatcher in the most blood, which is saying something given the Yellowjackets star now has an impressive resumé of horror films under her belt. “The amount of blood that I had on me topped any amount of blood that I’ve ever had on me. I don’t think you can go much further than that,” she promises.  

Hancock wrote the screenplay for Companion, which also stars Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, and Rupert Friend. The film premieres in theaters January 31.