Companion

Bluesky

While trailers do give away a number of significant plot points. Companion is sufficiently twisty as a comedy-inflected thriller that it gets away with a peek behind the curtain. Though it borrows significantly from genre, particularly science fiction and horror, its multi-hyphenate sensibilities make this closer to crime-gone-wrong antics like The Big Lebowski or Shallow Grave. There's a calculus of capers here. Bad decisions made by bad people don't just make situations worse, they make the movie better.

Writer-director Drew Hancock has plenty of TV credits, but this is a début feature. It's confident, even classy. While it does have smartphones and electric cars it could have been made in the 1970s, and I mean that as a positive. A single location, although extended with flashbacks and dream sequences, a single inciting incident, and plenty of strong performances. Its effects work is minimal. I look forward to a making-of featurette or three but credits for puppeteering suggest they aren't the only practical element worth noticing.

There's a lot on Josh's plate. Jack Quaid is no stranger to genre, particularly as a voice actor. I could joke about the Karl Urban retirement package but he's Quaid's mentor in ultraviolent superhero-deconstructor series The Boys. He's bringing Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to a rural retreat, hosted by friend Kat (Megan Suri) and her boyfriend Sergey (Ruper Friend). She's worried they won't like her. It's not, perhaps, unreasonable, as Sergey's got the kind of wealth that makes 'lakeside' more than an adjective. Eli (Harvey Guillen) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) are dancing and dining their way to completing the sextet, but the various configurations around the tables are just the start of the complications.

Thatcher's brilliant in what amounts to the eponymous role, but she's given space to shine by a script that's interested in recontextualising through revelation rather than hoping that the shock of the new will hide earlier seams. As with The Substance there's a lot going on underneath the surface, and much of that is based on a simple set of rules well deployed. There are plenty of tales of false memory and obfuscated potential. The thing that most suggests Companion isn't based on a lost Philip K Dick story is that it has more developed female characters than Blade Runner. As in Lucy or Don't Worry Darling, there is a risk that disbelief won't just be suspended but crash due to lack of processing power, but Companion is much more efficient with its use of resource. Whistling at about an hour and a half, it loops only where it needs to and finds ways to escape traps that an array of other films fall foul of.

The saying is that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but the most dangerous of all God's creatures is often a man spurned. With one primary location and a small cast there'd be a risk of staginess, even without a mysterious oblong and a Chekhov's gun that closeups suggest takes a Phillips screw. That's a plus though, as are often hilarious sentences that use portmanteaus as connectors.

Call it Anora by way of Asimov, and you'll be most of the way there. Its gender politics do show some degree of progress. Bar the odd exception, Iris has more agency than any number of other genre characters and she explains that this is her story right at the beginning. How it intersects and overlaps is down to the application of a few simple rules, and like many stories the mystery isn't in the 'who' but the 'how' and the 'why'. Answering these questions with a crystal clarity and ruthless efficiency, Companion is a delight.