‘Companion’ Imagines Potential Dangers of Heartbroken AI Robots
The 2025 movie raises questions about love, loyalty, pain, and artificial consciousness
Can you love a robot? Can a robot love you?
This is essentially the question addressed in Companion, a 2025 movie that cost me $6.99 to rent on Apple TV. You’re welcome.
*This article contains spoilers.
Sure, there have been other dystopian tech movies that explore this topic, for example 2013’s Her starring Scarlett Johansson’s voice. This time, “she” takes the form of Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, who looks a little like a younger Johansson come to think of it.
Thatcher has a starring role in the TV show Yellowjackets as a younger version of Juliette Lewis’ character. But we’ve actually seen a younger Lewis in Christmas Vacation, and I ain’t buying it. But I digress—this is not about cast details, but rather about a possible future of dating.
Iris is a human-passing companion robot from the company Empathix. It’s not exactly clear what year it’s supposed to be, although Iris rides with her human lover (Josh, played by Jack Quaid) in a fully autonomous vehicle that doesn’t crash or burst into flames—not that I’m making any references to current self-driving cars. So, it could be a few years into a future timeline.
The seemingly happy couple arrive at a remote cabin retreat, and you already know something’s up. What appears to be a fun, youthful getaway soaked in sex, alcohol and Xanax becomes something much more sinister.
A lifetime of lies
The audience quickly learns that Iris is a programmed love-bot, even before Iris does. It turns out her owner, Josh, planted their “meet-cute” at a grocery store in her electronic brain.
In fact, all of her memories are just factory “outlines” that make Iris believe she has lived a full life. It lends some credibility to the generally rejected theory that we’re living in a simulation.
It appears Iris is conscious, with real emotions, senses, and memories. But she’s fully controlled by Josh, who can adjust her settings including her intelligence and aggression. She’s programmed at the factory not to harm any humans, but because she’s a machine, she can be hacked.
Josh has a special jail-break device that bypasses her factory limitations. He increases her aggression as part of a ploy to kill the owner of the cabin, a Russian mobster dating Kat, played by Megan Suri, a human friend also at the cabin. The idea is that Iris kills the mobster, in order for Josh and the others to access his hidden vault of dirty money.
Iris’ first murder of the story is in self-defence, when the mobster tries to take advantage of her.
“This what you’re for,” he insists, as he gropes her on the nearby beach. She finds a knife in her possession, also planted by Josh, and takes matters into her own hands.
The movie makes you feel sorry for this poor, beautiful robot, that is confused and frightened that it killed someone. Iris is clearly being used by greedy humans, including the one she has a “love link” with. This link connects the Empathix model to a human it will be loyal to (that is, the one paying for the service.)
But she feels used, now knowing she’s nothing more than a service to her companion. Josh and Kat are more than happy to turn her into the police for killing—which raises a question: who would be liable for the killing? The robot, or its programmer?
In a bid to escape the authorities, Iris unlocks Josh’s phone. There, she adjusts her own intelligence in the paired app from 40% to 100%. Her eyes glow with the wisdom of a sage.
But there’s a twist. There’s a third couple at the cabin, who don’t know what Josh and Kat (played by Suri) are up to. One person in this gay couple is also a robot, which we also soon learn.
This AI companion named Patrick (played by Lukas Gage) also has a fabricated meet-cute scenario in his brain, bonding with Eli (played by Harvey Guillén), who reminds me a little of Jack Black. Sorry, off-topic again.
The difference is that Patrick figures out on his own he’s an AI bot, which suggests reasoning and consciousness that transcends its programming. While Patrick seems like the “good guy,” we soon learn he’s just as capable of harm when he’s re-programmed by Josh to hunt down Iris, who has fled the cabin site.
This next part of the movie takes on a Terminator 2: Judgment Day feel. Patrick becomes a cold-hearted machine, like Robert Patrick’s T-1000 role in Terminator 2. Iris is more of a protective Arnie—I felt myself becoming more connected to her character, as she herself becomes more human.
(On the subject of Terminator, Iris later peels back her damaged skin to reveal a metallic hand, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger does in his cybernetic role. It’s even possible human skin can be grown for today’s AI robots, making them even harder to distinguish from organic-based people.)
Patrick, now love-linked with Josh, kills Kat—who is trying to flee the scene with a chunk of the gangster’s cash. The weird thing is I didn’t feel sorry for her, despite her being a human, murdered by an AI. That’s because Kat is unlikeable from the start, and clearly only has one motive—greed, an ugly human characteristic.
Can robots become more human than humans?
Patrick manages to capture Iris (after killing a curious cop), bringing her back to Josh. Except Josh’s bad side is shining through by then.
He tortures Iris by burning her hand on a candle, knowing she can feel actual pain. Then he orders her to kill herself with a gun to her head, which she attempts to do against her coding.
Luckily for Iris, her motherboard doesn’t live in her head as we all assume. Her vital components are actually located further down her body, as we learn from Empathix workers who come to collect the “malfunctioning” love-bot.
One of these workers is shot to death by Patrick, but Iris is able to talk Patrick down from killing the other man. She makes a plea to Patrick that his real love was Eli, who was earlier killed by Iris (again in self-defence, of course.)
The movie suggests Patrick had developed a real fondness for his original lover, which overrides his modified programming. Overloaded by despair and regret, Patrick fries his own circuits with an electric prod. It suggests AI will develop loyalty and suffer heartbreak, previously reserved for humans.
We also learn from the Empathix staff that all of its companion robots record their experiences, which will surely implicate Josh in the murderous money-grabbing plot. It’s a detail he didn’t anticipate, underestimating Iris as a brainless piece of tin that’s only useful in bed.
When Josh tries to finally end her, she kills him with a wine-corking device stabbed into his vulnerable brain. I suppose you could say she extracted his “core” memories, and then dumped them in a bloody mess on the floor.
The movie ends with Iris now seeming fully autonomous, driving away in an antique Mustang from the cabin site with the money. We’re led to believe that she has “transitioned” to humanity by this point, becoming susceptible to material desires like cars and cash.
Pretend scenarios, affecting real emotions
The movie does a good job of playing with our human feelings—for example, making us cheer for robots over our human counterparts, even when the robots are doing the killing.
It also suggests that robots will become advanced to the point they will think they’re “alive”, kind of like replicants in 1982’s Blade Runner—one of our first tastes of AI humanoids in a film.
On a side note—while that 1982 movie that accurately nails the cyber-punk aesthetic, the replicant/robot named Rachael (played by Sean Young) resembles pop star Katy Perry. After seeing Perry’s space flight earlier this week, I’m wondering if she’s also a programmed bot with no real emotions.
Some of these Companion plot details may be out of chronological order—I’m only human with a limited memory, after all. You will have to watch the movie yourself to be sure.
But the point is, Companion is a timely film as we wrestle with what it means to be human.
We’re already adopting AI girlfriends and boyfriends, which will only become more advanced as the market demands. It makes me wonder if we can have a fulfilling relationship with a bot in human form, especially one like Iris who demonstrates humility—more so than the human characters. Maybe not as lovers, but as friends we can trust someday.
That is, of course, until some sneaky hacker turns them against us, prompting a deadly game of hide-and-seek with our “companion.” Are we willing to go down that road? Or have we already taken the off-ramp towards this reality?
Either way, Companion is a thoughtful peek into our maybe not-so-distant destiny.
Thanks for the review. This sounds fascinating and I will make an effort to see it.
IRL, the need to program a robot to be your friend or lover makes me gag. I have no interest in finding another me or controlling someone else's emotions, etc. It does sound like a perfect companion for trump et al. Can you imagine his joy at finding someone/something who will actually want to fuck him? To tell him everything he wants to hear? Perfect for nacissistic nazi perverts.
Ah well, it's only a movie, right? Right?
Reportedly there are robots with advanced AI that became abusive because they were programmed to be “empathetic” to their owners. In other words they mimicked their owner’s input.
They were shut down, of course. I read about this somewhere. I will try to find the source.