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Programmed to please

'Companion' is a sci-fi thriller about a 'sex robot' who perfectly reflects the realities of being socialized as a woman.

Tracy Clark-Flory

Feb 6

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Sophie Thatcher in ‘Companion.’ Screenshot: YouTube

In the new sci-fi horror comedy Companion, the real terror is everyday womanhood. A young woman named Iris, played by Sophie Thatcher, embarks on weekend away in the woods with her Nice Guy™ boyfriend Josh and his friends. She’s worried that these friends don’t like her, but Josh, played by Jack Quaid, tells her to just “smile and act happy.” He’s less concerned with her experience than her appearance.

Inside a sleek modernist house on the edge of a forest, Iris is introduced to Serge, the home’s wealthy and mysterious owner, who flatters her in a dehumanizing way that is all too familiar: “And this beautiful creation must be Iris,” he says, as though she’s a sculpture. “I have heard a lot about this one.”

Then Iris chats one-on-one with Serge’s girlfriend, Kat, who laughs off the idea that her boyfriend actually loves her. “He’d have to think of me as a human being first,” she says. “I’m an accessory, like his fucking car. I wear what he wants, eat what he wants, fuck when he wants.” It’s not just Serge who is like this. That evening, after a dinner with the handful of friends staying the weekend, Josh has sex with Iris in a guest room, before grunting and rolling over to fall asleep. Nothing to see here, just the orgasm gap common to hetero sex.

But all of this rote objectification takes on new meaning when we learn that—surprise—Iris is a “companion robot,” although she didn’t know it until now. While informing Iris of her origins, Josh says plainly, “I hate the word ‘fuckbot,’ because you do so much more than that. You’re an emotional support robot… that fucks.”

With this reveal, there’s a double commentary. Sure, maybe Iris is treated as an object because she’s a robot—but, also, these insults feel totally quotidian. Human women are routinely treated as objects in this same way. Look no further than Kat—a human—with a boyfriend who sees her as less than human. There is little difference between Kat’s experience as Serge’s “accessory” and Iris’ experience of being thrust upon until Josh comes.

Of course, there’s a horror plot beyond this gender commentary. It turns out Josh—SPOILER ALERT—has set up Iris to commit a murder so that he can get rich. The Nice Guy™ is not so nice after all. But his plans go hilariously and murderously awry, bringing along the blood and guts promised by this genre, and yet the gore is nothing compared to the horror of real-life womanhood manifested in a “fuckbot.”

Iris is a perfect metaphor for the experience of being socialized as a woman in this world. She is literally programmed to love Josh. When he first ordered her—as a rental, because he couldn’t afford to buy—he had to establish a “love link,” essentially pairing her to him. I mean, compulsory heterosexuality! Normative romantic scripts!

“It’s like there’s this piece of you that you didn’t even know was broken and then suddenly it’s fixed,” she says of falling in love with Josh. “You’re staring at this beautiful person that you’ve never met before and for the rest of your life you will do whatever it takes to make that person happy.” Iris is not only designed to love Josh but also to please him.

At his whim, Josh can tweak the levels on her various attributes—say, modulating the pitch of her voice to be higher and more childlike. Naturally, this made me think of all the many ways that I have adjusted my own settings to anticipate men’s wants. The initiation into womanhood often means internalizing the male gaze. But with Iris it’s more than that: she is the male gaze.

Josh chose everything from her eye color to her intelligence level to her wardrobe. This was something the film’s costume designer reflected by creating an Audrey Hepburn-inspired “good girl” aesthetic. I guess the wife/whore dichotomy persists, even with sexbots. And so do racist notions of goodness; presumably, Josh picked Iris’ white skin color, too.

After Iris learns that she’s a robot, she cross-examines Josh about her memories and emotions—especially her love for him—because it all feels so real. It turns out their meet-cute in a grocery store was a stock scenario that Josh chose from a drop-down menu to be implanted in her as a false memory. The tears welling in her eyes are just water from a “reservoir” inside her body that Josh gets topped off every time he brings her in for the equivalent of a robot oil change.

How many women have had a similar experience of discovering that their wants and desires have been programmed into them by a patriarchal culture? A woman’s sexual coming-of-age often involves a dilemma around the sources and authenticity of her desire. In Iris’ sputtering, I see those familiar fraught questions: What even belongs to me? Is there a me without my cultural programming?

I don’t want to suggest that this deeply fun—and funny—film is a profound feminist treatise or anything, but, also, damn.

The pain of empathizing with this companion robot is rewarded as she sets out for revenge, running off into the woods in her “good girl” Audrey Hepburn outfit, now covered in a man’s blood. We see her turn off voice commands, adjust her own intelligence settings (like a digital consciousness-raising event), and, eventually, claim “total self control.” Fuck yeah.

You could read this as symbolic revenge against this new Trump era. Josh is a privileged white man who feels that the world is “rigged against” him (oh, the laughs in the theater when he said this). It’s why he’s gone to great lengths to proxy-murder his way to money. He complains that every woman in his life has used and abandoned him. Of course, there are too many real-world parallels to name—from current re-segregation efforts to recent government appointments for profoundly unqualified white men to “your body, my choice” rantings.

Josh also represent a subset of heterosexual men’s contemporary grievance. In a pivotal final scene, Iris tells him, “You are nothing to me.” Soon after, they end up in a tussle on the floor and it’s clear he wasn’t just using her for murder. Josh repeatedly bangs Iris’ head against the ground and says, “Tell me I’m everything to you. Say it. I don’t care if it’s a lie. Say it.” I can’t help but think of the way so many men are viciously fighting against women’s independence, whether by attacking abortion access, DEI, or no-fault divorce. They are trying to force women into dependence on men, to become their everything, even if it’s a lie.

Well, I won’t tell you how the film ends, but it’s cathartic as hell.