Sharp satire cuts deep
Companion” may be the first great thriller of the year—a smart, funny, scary jaunt that would’ve been much more impactful if the central conceit hadn’t been given away by the poster and trailers.
The debut feature of writer/director Drew Hancock, and executive produced by Zach Cregger (“Barbarian”), “Companion” is a near-future thriller that is tricky to introduce without revealing too much. Young couple Iris (Sophie Thatcher, “Yellowjackets”) and Josh (Jack Quaid, “The Boys”) go to a remote but fancy lake house to spend the weekend with Josh’s friends. It seems it’s early enough in the relationship that Iris is still nervous and worried about how said friends see and/or like her, though she has already met one of them before.
The house is owned by their friend Kat’s (Megan Suri) new boyfriend, Sergey (Rupert Friend, “Homeland”), and also along for the vacation are another couple, Eli (Harvey Guillen, “What We Do in the Shadows”) and Patrick (Lukas Gage, “The White Lotus”).
Everything’s nice and cozy enough, the occasional snarky snipe aside, but things take a turn for the much, much worse the next day when an encounter with Sergey leaves Iris with no choice but to defend herself, with disastrous consequences and a fraught situation with the guests.
Conflict
Vacation over, so to speak. But there’s more, and it feels a disservice to reveal some nice surprises. The rest of the film is a pitched conflict about what to do, who’s responsible, and how much time they have before authorities figure out something has happened.
While the marketing tease of “From the Creators of ‘Barbarian’” might lead one to think this was a horror flick, it’s closer to a science fiction thriller, with new apps and technology imparting new ways for human beings to be awful to one another, but also with headier topics like existentialism, consciousness, authenticity of memory, identity, and the like.
“Companion” isn’t didactic, in fact its strength is a black-as-tar sense of humor that bumps up nicely with some violent onscreen activity. The tension is often released by something funny suddenly happening in the middle of a chase, or a sharp line of dialogue while someone is hiding for their life.
It’s lovely to see Thatcher using her breaks from her hit show “Yellowjackets” (season three debuts on Valentine’s!) to do even more scary projects. Her film before “Companion” was last year’s “Heretic,” and she also did “The Boogeyman” during another between-seasons break. She knows what she’s good at, her performance as Iris the anchor that holds the film firmly together, but Quaid, Guillen, and Gage are great, too. Quaid has carved out a nice little niche for himself with his recent role choices, sometimes playing against type to very effective results.
Aspects of “Companion” will ring familiar, and that is likely to be the source of some empathy and relatability with regard to the peril of the main character. But with generous amounts of absurdity and laughs (including an excellent soundtrack that includes Goo Goo Dolls as well as Samantha Sang’s “Emotion”), the thrills are never in danger of shaking the audience to its core, though it will raise some interesting post-screening questions for you to debate with your friends and, well, companions.
“Companion” is an SM Cinemas exclusive.
