The New Companion Trailer Just Teased A Wild Sci-Fi Twist
Rise of the femmebots.
It’s not easy selling a movie that depends on its show-stopping twist. Studios have long struggled to find the perfect balance for promotion, walking a thin line between teasing their target audience and providing enough context to court genuine interest. It’s a struggle that New Line Cinema, producer Zach Cregger (Barbarian), and first-time director Drew Hancock are now navigating with Companion, a romantic horror comedy that, until very recently, no one knew much about.
The first teaser revealed very little about Companion’s plot. It introduced Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets, Heretic) and Jack Quaid (The Boys) as a toxic couple. It also drew a few not-so-subtle parallels to two of the studio’s past films, The Notebook and Barbarian. Beyond that, however, there wasn’t much to glean. Had Hancock had his way, audiences might have been in the dark until Companion hit theaters. But with its release date fast approaching, New Line is finally cluing us into the film's premise, and it’s got a lot more to do with Ex Machina or The Stepford Wives than with The Notebook.
The Sun wasn’t kidding when it predicted more human-robot relations in 2025. Though that hare-brained theory has yet to bleed into the real world, Companion embraces the concept with a dark twist. Thatcher plays Iris, a young woman spellbound by her billionaire boyfriend, Josh (Quaid). After their quaint meet-cute in a grocery store, Iris accompanies Josh and his friends on a weekend getaway. But their honeymoon phase is soon interrupted by a disturbing truth: Iris is a “sex bot” programmed to cater to Josh’s every desire, and every aspect of their relationship has been carefully orchestrated by him.
“There have been two moments in my life when I was happiest,” Iris explains via voiceover. “The first was the day I met Josh... and the second, the day I killed him.” The Companion trailer isn’t leaving much to the imagination there: if Iris wants to escape from Josh’s clutches, she’ll have to take him out, and anyone else in her path.
Companion is the latest in a long line of femmebot horror features, joining the ranks of M3GAN and the recent Subservience starring Megan Fox. With the loose beats of its premise out in the open, one might think the rest of its story will follow a predictable pattern, but the cast and crew insist that more twists are still to come.
Companion will deliver a remix of familiar tropes: “It’s not A.I. gone wrong, it’s A.I. gone right.”
“It’d be so easy to just be like, ‘This is M3GAN,’ or ‘This is the Megan Fox movie,’” Hancock recently told Entertainment Weekly. “This is a robot movie, but it’s not like any other robot movie that’s out right now. It’s not A.I. gone wrong, it’s A.I. gone right.”
Whatever “A.I. gone right” entails, one can expect a suitably bonkers turn from Thatcher. The trailer puts her character through the wringer, as Iris is dragged through mud, set on fire, and practically baptized in blood. Don’t count her out, though; once she becomes self-aware, there’s no limit to what she can actually do.
“It’s a movie about self-discovery and, at its core, is a breakup movie about this woman finding empowerment through discovery of self,” Hancock continued. That her empowerment comes in such a violent package is just part of Companion’s charm, but the film will, ideally, find other ways to set itself apart from others in this growing subgenre too.
