‘Companion’ Review: Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid Star in a Wily, Well-Oiled Scary Movie Machine

One of the greatest enemies a motion picture can have is its own marketing. Previews, posters and even hashtags are, for most people, our first exposure to a new release, revealing relevant information and teasing possibilities and plot points. Sometimes this information is accurate and enticing. Sometimes it’s misleading and sets the audience up for disappointment. And sometimes it’s very accurate, but arguably to a fault.

The trailers for writer/director Drew Hancock’s debut feature “Companion” are giving the audience a very good idea of the movie they’re about to watch, and that’s a little unfortunate, because the film is best viewed without any preconceived notions. Hancock’s wry and creepy screenplay sets its own expectations, inviting the audience along for a particular kind of scary thrill ride. When Hancock pulls out the rug we can see through the floor, into the movie’s mechanisms, and it’s a treat to uncover what kind of machine he’s actually built for us — all of which is harder to do if you’re 30 minutes ahead of the plot just because you saw the marketing.

So in the interest of not compounding the issue — especially since “Companion” is such a joy to discover on one’s own — this review will dance around the movie’s core premise to the best of my film critic abilities. “The Red Eye Effect” is bad enough. Let’s not make it worse.

“Companion” stars Sophie Thatcher (“Heretic”) as Iris, who was gliding through life without incident until she met Josh (Jack Quaid, “The Boys”), who is her perfect guy. He’s handsome, he’s charming and you’ve probably seen enough romantic comedies to know that any meet-cute as cute as this — there are oh, so many oranges! — means they’re destined to fall in love. To hear Iris tell it, meeting Josh was one of the two most important, eye-opening moments of her life.

The other, as she says in the film’s opening voiceover, is when she killed him.

The story kicks off when Josh and Iris drive to an isolated luxury house in the middle of a forest — yup, we’re doing one of these — where they’re planning to party with Josh’s friends and their lovers. Kat (Megan Suri, “It Lives Inside”) is Josh’s bestie, and Iris is very jealous of their connection and possible romantic (or formerly romantic) relationship. Her boyfriend, a married Russian who earned his millions the dirty way, is Sergey (Rupert Friend, “Asteroid City”), and he’s just gross. Also in attendance are Josh’s flighty friend Eli (Harvey Guillén, “What We Do in the Shadows”) and his extremely hot boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, “Smile 2”).

As we wait to find out what’s going to go horribly wrong, we take note of various details that will probably be important later. Kat’s confession that Iris makes her feel “replaceable.” A mysterious item in Josh and Iris’ luggage. The fact that Josh, ostensibly the perfect guy, actually seems like a total tool. Any movie where a boyfriend rolls over and goes to sleep right after sex without saying a thing is, after all, a movie with a crappy boyfriend in it.

When violence does break out, it seems like a familiar sort of violence. Brutal and disturbing, but in a “low budget what do we do about this murder and how do we keep from killing each other now that the first domino has fallen” kind of way. And hey, it seems like a fine, albeit formulaic place for “Companion” to go, using an unexpected explosion of bloodletting to explore the repressed feelings inside a seemingly harmless person, calling into question the relationships they’ve formed, and forcing everyone to reveal who they really are.

And that’s kind of what happens, but Hancock’s twisteroos are fiendish, and “Companion” soon spirals into exciting and ingenious directions. The fundamental conceits, once finally revealed, speak volumes about the way men view women and women are conditioned to view men. An idyllic vision of love meets the commodification of love, and the commodification of love turns out to be insincere, insecure and dangerous. What’s more, Hancock has a vicious sense of humor about it. The whole thing is freaky and funny as hell.

Thatcher has a wallflower to play for the first chunk of “Companion,” but as she breaks out of her expectations, she goes on an engrossing journey and a lot of people end up dead. All the people she thought she loved, and their mostly-awful friends, drop their façades and reveal their pathetic and dangerous wretchedness. Iris and Josh are on a nonstop collision course with self-discovery, and they don’t make the discoveries they were hoping for. Thatcher captivates and Quaid proves once again that he’s one of the most charming on-screen (and voiceover) performers in the industry, and that he isn’t afraid to tear all that down and dig up the awfulness that veneer often hides.

Hancock does a fabulous job of balancing his film’s early romantic leanings and the horror (and possibly other genre) conceits that emerge as his story unfolds, and all the emotional truths that prop all those aspects up. It’s one of the better screenplays of its ilk in years, setting up ideas and rules and playing with them in every imaginable way, and repeatedly surprising the audience while always playing fair. That it evokes some familiar territory in the first act, especially, is by design, but sometimes it’s more distracting than others.

“Companion” was produced by Zach Eggers, whose own breakout horror feature “Barbarian” was a big hit in 2022 and also relied on unexpected twists and turns. It’s the “Barbarian” connection that’s touted in the trailers, along with the fact that Warner Bros. also released the schmaltzy romance classic “The Notebook.” How cheeky. But the cynicism of “Barbarian” wasn’t tempered. It was ugly — arguably to a fault — and its anger wasn’t always well-placed. Hancock’s film takes a similar approach to the storytelling but tells a more satisfying story. It’s scary, in a very different way. It’s funny, in a somewhat similar way. “Companion” is an impressively constructed mechanism that functions exactly how it’s supposed to, even when it seems like it’s not, and it never lets us down.

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