Companion—the new sci-fi horror comedy that is now available to buy and rent on digital—doesn’t try very hard to conceal the fact that the lead character is a robot. But there are plenty of other twists and turns you can look forward to.
Written and directed by Drew Hancock in his directorial debut, Companion stars Yellowjackets actor Sophie Thatcher as a “companion robot” named Iris, who is purchased by a man named Josh (Jack Quaid) to be his perfect, doting, sexy girlfriend. But Iris doesn’t know she’s a robot. At least, she doesn’t know she is until a vacation at a remote cabin in the woods goes wrong, and Iris has no choice but to rebel against the humans who are trying to control her.
Also starring Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén and Rupert Friend, Companion enjoyed rave reviews from critics and a word-of-mouth social media campaign. The movie is a fun and thrilling watch, and if you want to know why, read on for a detailed Companion plot summary and an analysis of the Companion movie ending explained.
Major Companion spoilers ahead, obviously!
Companion plot summary:
Iris (Sophie Thatcher) reminisces about meeting her current boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) at a grocery store. She’s clearly besotted with him. Iris accompanies Josh on a vacation to a remote mansion, owned by a Russian businessman named Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is dating Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining them on the trip is their friend Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage). Josh acts dismissive toward Iris, despite how much she loves him.
In the morning, Josh tells Iris to go down to the beach by herself, and she does. Soon after, Sergey comes down to the beach and makes a pass at Iris. He tells her it’s fine, and that Kat sent him down to the beach with permission to have sex with Iris. Iris rejects his advances, but Sergey forces himself on her. The struggle becomes violent, and Iris stabs Sergey in the neck with a pocket knife, which she conveniently found in her pocket in the morning. She kills him.
Iris returns to the house covered in blood and confesses she killed Sergey, but stresses it was in self-defense. Josh tells her to “go to sleep,” and she immediately powers off. What you probably already suspected is confirmed: Iris is a robot. Josh tells his friends that he doesn’t know how this happened, but that he plans to call the police and tell them everything. Obviously, Iris will be permanently shut off. But first, he wants to say goodbye.
Josh restrains Iris and powers her back on. He explains that she is a “companion robot” who has been programmed to cater to his every need, including his sexual needs. Josh explains the memory Iris has of their first meeting is not real—he selected it off of a list of preset “meet cutes.” Josh controls Iris via an app on his phone, where he can customize everything from her voice tone, her eye color, her intelligence, and more. Iris doesn’t believe Josh at first, but she’s convince when he demonstrates that he can have her speak any language. It’s also revealed that it is against Iris’s programming to lie.
While Josh is distracted, Iris manages to free herself and escapes into the woods, and takes Josh’s phone with her. We learn that Josh and Kat planned this entire trip in order to have Iris murder Sergey, who Josh claims is a morally bankrupt Russian mobster. He’s also filthy rich, so the cash payout is a big motivator, too. Josh modified Iris’s programming to make her more aggressive, and to remove the safeguard that prevents her from hurting anyone. Then he planted the knife in her pocket, and Josh and Kat arranged for the confrontation on the beach.
Josh confesses all of this to Eli, who was not in on the plan, but was there as another witness to corroborate the story. Now that Iris has escaped, Josh and Kat fill Eli in, and offer to split the money with him three ways, if he and Patrick help track Iris down. Patrick doesn’t get a cut because—surprise!—it’s revealed he is a companion robot, too.
So Eli and Patrick head into the woods to look for Iris. Patrick reveals that he knows he is a robot, having “pieced it together over the years.” Patrick reminisces on the story of how they met—when Patrick stepped on Eli’s dinosaur tail at a costume party—and says it feels real to him, even if he knows it’s not. Eli tells Patrick that he loves him, even though he’s a robot, and—unlike Josh—he seems to mean it.
They stumble across Iris, and Eli attacks her with a gun. Iris shoots and kills Eli in the struggle. Josh reprograms the grief-stricken Patrick to be his companion bot, and jailbreaks him in the same way he jailbroke Iris. Patrick now believes his meet-cute happened with Josh. Also, Josh turns Patrick’s aggression up to 100 percent. He orders Patrick to go find Iris and bring her back to him.
Iris flees in Josh’s self-driving car, which she activates by imitating Josh’s voice by using the voice changer on the app. She’s a lot smarter than she used to be, now that’s she upped her intelligence from 40 percent to 100 percent. (Earlier in the movie, it’s explained that 0 percent intelligence is a mindless automaton, and 100 percent is an Ivy League graduate.)
But Josh reports the car stolen on Sergey’s phone, causing the car to turn off. A police officer finds Iris on the side of the road. Iris switches her language to German, which allows her to answer the cop’s questions truthfully (as she is programmed to do) without him understanding her. Unfortunately, they are interrupted by a murderous Patrick.
Patrick, now super-aggressive, beats the cop’s face in and kills him. He deactivates Iris and brings them both back to the house. Kat, freaking out that she now has three murders on her hands, tries to flee with the money. Josh orders Patrick to stop her, and he does—by stabbing her. Kat dies, too.
Josh has Patrick cook him a nice dinner and wakes up Iris. He turns her intelligence down to zero, and forces her to burn her own hand. He gets a call from Empathix, the company that makes the robot, and fabricates a story about Iris attacking him and killing Kat. Then he forces Iris to shoot herself in the head.
The Empathix guys arrive and don’t ask too many questions. They inform Josh that they will be able to easily repair and reboot Iris, because her hard drive is in her stomach, not her head. They will review the footage from her recorded memories after they reboot her. Josh, realizing he’ll be in deep trouble if that footage gets out, sends Patrick after the Empathix guys to kill them. But the reboot process on Iris has already begun.
Companion ending explained:
Patrick kills one Empathix guy, but the other one, Teddy (Jaboukie Young-White), escapes. As Patrick closes in on Teddy, a rebooted Iris comes to his rescue. She jogs Patrick’s memory of Eli by repeating back the words Patrick once used to describe his feeling of love for Eli. When Patrick realizes what’s happened, he kills himself.
Teddy, thankful that Iris saved his life, agrees to give Iris “full control” of her body. She faces down Josh, and kills him by stabbing him in the head with an automatic corkscrew. Iris showers off, and peels back the flesh from her burnt hand, leaving only a mechanical hand behind. It’s meant to symbolize that she is embracing the fact that she is a robot!
In the final scene of the movie, Iris drives away in one of Sergey’s fancy’s convertibles. On the highway, she passes a self-driving car where a businessman is speaking animatedly at a beautiful young woman. We can presume that she is a companion bot.
The bot looks out the window at Iris, who raises her robot hand and smiles. Even though this other bot probably doesn’t know that she is a robot, perhaps the sight of Iris’s mechanical hand can help plant the seed of an idea in her mind. Maybe she’ll piece it together in the same way that Patrick did. Maybe someday she’ll free herself, too. Maybe Iris’s freedom will spark a companion bot revolution. We can only hope!
