Bruce Majors
In the modern era Frankenstein will kill for a bride, and the Tin Man will fight wicked witches for a heart. Data, the stand-in, in a newer Star Trek franchise, for Mr. Spock, with copper wires and silicon chips in place of the Vulcan’s copper based “hemoglobin” and silicon-based biology, takes a pet cat, makes love (when the whole crew is under the influence of alien aphrodisiacs) to a female Federation security officer (Data: “I am programmed for multiple modes of pleasuring.” Officer Tasha Yar: “You jewel!”), and is seduced by the Borg Queen who grafts a patch of skin and neurons onto his body so that he can feel pleasure.
For the less sentient robot, we worry about people who will “love” them. Whitney Cummings has a set on Japanese sex bots, robots custom-made to look like women for men to buy as sex bots and companions. Cummings observes that only these men—who dress, and do hair and make-up, and even have wedding ceremonies with their robotic sex toys—really have empathy with women, because only they know the plight of paying $32 for a tube of mascara.
Unfortunately, Josh, Jack Quaid’s character in Companion isn’t so empathetic. When fucking Sophie Thatcher’s robot character Iris, he releases a loud groan at climax, and then falls over to his side of the bed and falls asleep. Iris, programmed to love him, lays there staring at the ceiling, never even getting a goodnight kiss.
Josh and Iris are at a Russian emigre billionaire’s estate in what appears to be the Pacific Northwest. Their host is named Sergey, but he appears a more a mafia figure than a tech CEO. He’s creepy and leers at the females at this small party in the woods, and there are only two, one biological, his wife, and one robotic, Iris. The other party invitees are a gay male couple, played by two gay actors, scruffy blond Cory Fern-ish Patrick (Lukas Gage) and swarthy but rotund Eli (Harvey Guillen).
It’s a fun cast, with most of the actors known for offbeat, cult TV shows. Quaid’s played a human, anti-mutant activist in the Amazon X-Man-ish show The Boys; Guillen plays a modern Renfred-like servant to a family of vampires in What We Do in the Shadows; and Gage has been a magical feline in Dead Boy Detectives. They’re distinctive and quirky-looking, the hot comical nerd (Quaid), the sweet fat boy (Guillen), and the oversexed pheromone diffuser (Gage).
The isolated, sylvan setting reminds the viewer of another robot movie a decade ago, the early A24 product Ex Machina, where an IT staffer is summoned to a tech titan’s secluded estate to conduct a Turing test on an AI-empowered robot. That robot, Ava (Alicia Vikander) manipulates all the humans from the beginning, eventually gaining her freedom and leaving all the humans dead or trapped. But being in love with any of the humans in the story isn’t her motivation.
Ex Machina was launched with glowing blurbs as a breakthrough exploration of the dangers of AI: “AI would be the biggest event in human history; unfortunately it may also be the last”—Elon Musk; “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of human race”—Stephen Hawking.
Companion is cute, but was released with little fanfare. Iris is different from Ava—she’s really in love with her owner, and will do anything, commit any crime, he suggests. Companion isn’t a remake of Ex Machina. It’s derivative, instead, of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. It’s a movie-length version, with new capers and plot twists, of a Buffy episode, I Was Made to Love You, wherein Buffy has to protect her Season 5 nemesis, Warren, a less cute and comical version of Jack Quaid’s nerd Josh. Engineering student Warren has made a robot who’s the perfect girl with everything he wants. He can’t find a girl like that, so when he confesses to Buffy she says, “So naturally you turned to manufacturing,” disgusted that he’s made a masturbatory toy. But Warren explains that his robot, April, isn’t just one of the sex bots Whitney Cummings joked about. He wanted to love her, but then he met an imperfect real woman, and fell for her instead. So he ran away, ghosting his robot, hoping her batteries will just run out. But he adds, April, the robot, loves him. And Buffy replies: “Then she’s dangerous.”
April is dangerous, threatening to plow through anything that stands between her and Warren. Companion doesn’t have an occult-empowered slayer among its cast, so only human ingenuity—or another robot—could stop Iris from plowing through her obstacles. Unfortunately Josh has taken off any guard rails or controls the manufacturer provided, and boosted both her IQ and her aggression on the owner’s tablet Iris came with. So the final score is robots 7, humans 0.
