Sophie Thatcher Is a Vengeance-Crazed Robo-Manic Pixie Dream Girl in Companion
plus, she's totally autistic!
Robots are autistic. They aren’t all autistic, mind you, but a lot of them are, particularly at the very advanced end of the spectrum. Humanoid robots are designed to look and act like human beings. The people they end up resembling and behaving like are frequently neurodivergent.
The same is true of aliens. Not every alien is autistic, of course. The ones in Mars Attacks! probably are not, but in pop culture, many are heavily coded as neurodivergent, most notably Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
Iris, the gamine android beauty at the heart of writer-director Drew Hancock’s Companion, might be a robot, but I embrace her as my beautiful, bewildered, neurodivergent sister all the same.
As masterfully played by Sophie Thatcher, with the perfect mixture of Audrey Hepburn-like charm and infinite sadness, Iris (like the Goo Goo Dolls song) was created to serve owner Josh (Jack Quaid, who seems to be everywhere now).
Jack Quaid plays a hateable exemplar of toxic masculinity in a Best Vilain Blockbuster Entertainment Award-worthy turn of exquisite evil.
Like his dad in The Substance and Reagan, Quaid delivers a wonderfully smarmy performance as a selfish monster who embodies the shittiness of men as a gender.
I realized recently that something that many Manic Pixie Dream Girls share is that they have ADHD or autism that is neither diagnosed nor treated. That’s why they’re so damned quirky! That’s why they don’t behave like everybody else and seem to live in their own weird, wonderful world.
In a strange coincidence, the men in the Manic Pixie Dream are also often heavily coded as autistic. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the lonely sad sack she inspires seem neurodivergent, but that neurodivergence differs along gender lines.
The men whose lives are changed forever by their dalliance with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl are introverted and awkward, depressed, lacking in confidence, and stuck in a rut of habit and routine. Manic Pixie Dream Girls, meanwhile, are quirky and overflowing with life and personality.
At the beginning of Companion, Iris is very much an autistic-coded Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She exists for the sake of a lonely man who sees her as the culmination of his romantic and sexual fantasies and desires. She has no agency or will of her own.
She’s the product of profound misanthropy and misogyny that sees beautiful young women exclusively as instruments for male pleasure. From the outside, Iris is perfection, but Josh sees her as a fuck bot with a bunch of fancy extras, the ultimate girlfriend experience, in that he can turn her off when he’s bored with her, not an actual partner. Josh might not have created Iris, but he controls her with his phone.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl myth is rooted in an unhealthy fetishization of neurodivergence as romantic and fun and young and not something that makes your life much more challenging and makes the lives of the people you love harder as well.
Companion is an incisive and subversive deconstruction of the mindset behind this deathless archetype, which seems innocuous or positive yet causes pain and becomes dehumanizing no matter how good the intentions.
Plenty of terrible men want the women in their lives to be beautiful and dumb. Josh has the awful power to make that happen by pressing a few buttons.
In Companion, Josh and Iris travel to a decadent lakehouse owned by Sergey (Rupert Friend), a cocky Russian with a power mullet, fortune of enigmatic origins, and an ominous aura.
The other guests are Kat (Megan Suri), Sergey’s mistress, an attractive mean girl who makes no effort to hide her contempt for Iris, and Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his Twink robot companion Patrick (Lucas Gage).
Iris is devastated to learn that she is a robot whose actions are the product of programming rather than free will. Josh’s coldness and insensitivity exacerbate this trauma.
The revelation engenders an existential crisis for Iris. She’s fundamentally different from the people around her in the way neurodivergent people differ from neurotypical. She is a perpetual outsider who does not understand herself, a complicated and confusing world, or her place in it.
When Sergey tries to sexually assault what he sees as a machine rather than a woman with the ability to turn him down, Iris kills him in self-defense.
Iris might wrack up a nice little body count here and spend much of the film in clothing soaked in blood that is not hers. Yet Iris is, in many ways, an innocent. She’s too pure for a grubby and degraded world where everyone has an angle and nothing good is real, but rather a hollow computer simulation.
Companion is a film with gorgeous surfaces and swooning sounds, but its characters are rotten to the core. Nothing exposes the venality and ugliness of the human condition quite like our robot doppelgangers, who are just like us but not quite.
Iris may be a robot on the spectrum, but she’s the most human character in the film. She unknowingly begins the film a possession of a man even more awful than most but empowers herself when she increases her intelligence level from 40 to 100.
She begins to see the world as it is rather than the lie she has been fed and unthinkingly believed.
In a related development, Patrick’s aggression level is increased to 100, and he makes a horrifying transformation from dreamy fuck boi to a heartless, soulless, sociopathic, dead-eyed killing machine.
Companion begins Lynchian and dream-like. It grows more brutal as it progresses, and Iris and Patrick lash out against their human oppressors in violent and extreme ways.
Thatcher is mesmerizing as a perfect pink cloud who discovers her autonomy and rage once she realizes that the world as she understands it is a poisonous lie designed to keep her docile and compliant.
Companion lost the weekly poll to determine what new movie I would go to the theater to see Dog Man, but I really wanted to see this movie, so I figured I would double my pleasure and workload by watching and reviewing Companion and Dog Man, which I will be seeing with my son on Monday night.
I’m glad I did! I found Companion is visually stunning, feminist science fiction of ideas that’s timely and relevant in its exploration of the downside to technology that’s too powerful in its capacity for destruction as well as creation.
Four stars out of five
Sounds better than the similarly-themed Megan Fox movie!
I loved the hell out of this. I saw as part of the Scream Unseen last week at AMC. I went in without knowing the robot reveal, being one to avoid trailers on the whole. I've loved seeing Sophie Thatcher since PROSPECT nearly a decade ago. She's also fantastic in the underseen Exorcist TV show. I'm really glad her career has been taking off lately (I've heard great things about Yellowjackets). Interesting to see Jack Quaid play this type of guy at least twice after Scream V. I've also not seen The Boys, is he like that there too? There are shots here where he looks so much like his dad, it's uncanny.
While it didn't light up the box office - 10m (but on a 10m budget, so a success!), I'm glad I've heard mostly nothing but universal praise from people I know who have seen it, along with most reviews.
I'm not surprised to see the age/gender breakdown of responses (from an article I read) is higher favorability of women than men across the board, and men liking more the older they are (I'm 2)h men under 25 giving, IIRC, 14% approval.
I wrote it up further on my own blog - city of geek dot com if anyone is interested in reading.