Companion Continues A Hot-Button Horror Trend That's More Relevant Than Ever

This article contains spoilers for "Companion."

In 1985, John Hughes directed the off-beat sci-fi sex comedy "Weird Science," about two teenage boys who use a supercomputer to generate their ultimate dream girl (played by Kelly LeBrock). The following year, Wes Craven put out "Deadly Friend," where a teenage boy refused to accept that the girl he had a crush on had become brain-dead, and implanted his robot's processor to bring her back. The year after that, Pamela Gidley starred in the titular role in the sci-fi action flick "Cherry 2000," where in the at-the-time-not-so-distant future of 2017, society has become hypersexual but so averse to intimacy that gynoids have become the dominant substitute for wives.

Robot girlfriends are nothing new, with "The Twilight Zone" even examining the psychology behind human beings finding romantic connections and emotional fulfillment with androids in the 1959 episode, "The Lonely." But as technology continues to advance and we inch closer to the certitude of AI companions as no longer an imagined concept, we're starting to see the real-life ramifications of believing the future is female as long as she's programmable. "Creating a perfect partner that you control and meets your every need is really frightening," Tara Hunter, the acting CEO for Full Stop Australia warned The Guardian. "Given what we know already is that the drivers of gender-based violence are those ingrained cultural beliefs that men can control women, that is really problematic." 

When the companion app Eva AI launched in 2023, it came with the slogan "Control it all the way you want to," and some men have already admitted to verbally abusing their virtual girlfriends. This is concerning, to put it lightly. Tangible, responsive, realistic robot girlfriends are an inevitability, but the one solace I have in this waking dystopia we call life is that if pathetic, insecure losers who would rather control a robot girlfriend than spend a nanosecond learning emotional competency, improving their hygiene, or developing the necessary social and empathy skills to deserve a partner will get what they want — those bots will one day fight back.

If there's any justice in this world, it'll look like the companion bot Iris escaping her abusive boyfriend Josh in "Companion."

When we first meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher) in "Companion," she's recalling her meet-cute with Josh (Jack Quaid), the man she believes to be her boyfriend but who is actually her owner. The meet-cute is nothing more than a programmed outline of a memory to help Iris develop a backstory. She's slowly pushing a shopping cart down the aisles at a grocery store heading toward the produce section when Josh accidentally knocks over an entire display of oranges trying to introduce himself to her. It's such an adorable "how we met" story that it's become a cliche, so much so that it was subverted in the Sebastian Stan horror movie, "Fresh." But the supermarket scene isn't only a reference to a rom-com standard, it's also a reference to the grandmother of all dystopian robot wife stories, "The Stepford Wives." Bryan Forbes' 1975 cinematic adaptation of Ira Levin's novel of the same isn't the first "men will really replace their wives with robots instead of going to therapy" narrative, but it is undoubtedly the forebearer to every AI partner horror story that followed. Hell, the term "Stepford Wife" is the common colloquial shorthand used to quickly describe characters like Iris.

"The Stepford Wives" is a horrifying tale of a town where men replace their wives with "perfect" robot replicas that embrace 1950s gender roles and submit themselves freely to their husbands. The final scene of the film shows the placid, smiling, perfectly coiffed wives of Stepford picking up groceries for the week and greeting one another with the manufactured pleasantries of a game show host. It's where the audience learns that protagonist Joanna (Katharine Ross) was unable to escape the transformation, a bleak ending wrapped in a well-ironed shirtwaist dress and an oversized summer hat. The scene was also included in the campy remake from 2004 starring Nicole Kidman.

"The Stepford Wives" was originally written to be a satire, but tragically, this is exactly the world that some men are hoping to make real.

The motivating factor explored throughout these stories often falls under two categories — a need for control or a desire to play God. Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) in "Ex Machina" for instance, is a billionaire software engineer who has chosen to invest his money into perfecting gyroids so lifelike that they can replace women as mates and servants. He also obtained the data for his AI creations to "learn" from by stealing data off of the search engine he created, which is a terrifyingly real possibility that I'm going to move right past before I have an existential crisis mid-sentence. Nathan is eventually destroyed by his own hubris, as he believes the true sign of sentience is the ability to deceive people's emotions for selfish goals. In essence, consciousness is the ability to dominate another person into submission.

I'm instantly reminded of a line from the rape-revenge film "I Spit On Your Grave," in which one of the rapists says, "Total submission. That's what I like in a woman. Total submission." Rape is the most extreme form of sexual violence, but it's an act rooted in control and stripping a person of their autonomy. By design, it's a prerequisite for an AI Girlfriend to lack autonomy. When the Empathix company delivers Iris to Josh in "Companion," the technician tells him that she'll be completely docile and that he can do "whatever he wants" to her.

Moments after he establishes a Love Link with her, the lovebot version of pairing your iPhone with the Bluetooth in your car, he has sex with her. When Iris finally learns the truth of her identity, he even calls her a "f***bot," before pleading with her that she does "so much more" for him than that. Toward the end of the film, an Empathix worker named Sid (Matt McCarthy) has a conversation with his coworker about how often people torture their companion bots by using them for target practice or chaining them up in basements — the violence is normalized, expected, and something he says you "get used to," because "boys will be boys" would have been a little too on the nose.

While plenty try to pitch AI girlfriend stories as technology's cure to remedy loneliness, the reality is that people already utilizing AI girlfriend apps are getting off on the power and control they can exert over women who literally cannot fight back. Courtney Pauroso's "Vanessa 5000" performance art comedy special as part of Dropout Presents was a brilliant, biting examination of society's relationship with women, sex, technological artifice, and intimacy, flipping the script by playing a sexbot slowly forcing the audience to reckon with the fact that she will one day be indistinguishable from an actual human woman, and challenging their current compliance with active objectification.

To receive Pauroso's message is to willingly watch as she turns herself into a literal sex object programmed to respond to audience applause, seek male validation, and obey commands. "Perhaps, someday, Vanessas will be able to gestate bespoke human children, or perhaps maybe one day Vannesas will be state-issued girlfriends that double as government watchdogs," she says with an AI-esque vocal pattern. "Or maybe even one day, Vannesas will be militarized weapons like in the 1997 American film, 'Austin Powers.' Yeah, baby." She is referring to the Fembots, of course, beautiful blonde mod bots capable of seducing their victims and shooting them with bullets that fire out of their breasts.

It's a great joke, but if films like "Deadly Friend," "Ex Machina," "Companion," and yes, even "Austin Powers" are to be believed, the necessary step that follows the normalization of AI girlfriends is the AI Girlfriend Uprising, and I for one will gladly support the cause.

Robots-run-amok tales are also nothing new, but the overwhelming majority are tales of dystopian corruption like "The Terminator," AI going rogue like "I, Robot," "2001: A Space Odyssey," and "The Mitchells vs. The Machines," or the techno version of "women be crazy and clingy, right?" with "M3GAN," "Subservience," and even the Disney Channel Original Movie, "Smart House." For the longest time, tales of robots fighting against humans portrayed robots as the ultimate threat, and technology as something to be feared. Don't get me wrong, we should still fear AI, not because it's inherently evil, but because AI will always be a reflection of what it learns from us.

When I interviewed Franklin Ritch, the writer/director of "The Artifice Girl" back in 2023, he said that what he thinks will remain relevant is "exploring this idea that AI will be a reflection of the best and worst parts of the people that create it," which is precisely what a film like "Companion" is finally doing. As writer/director Drew Hancock told me in our interview, "If you lived in a world where your phone looked like a human being, how would that affect not just how you relate to the phone, but how does it relate to human beings [...] the line between a robot and a human is so blurred, are you going to objectify everything?"

Iris isn't a dangerous robot because she's intrinsically something to be feared, she's a dangerous robot because she's seen the cruelty humans are capable of unleashing and learned how to put a stop to it by any means necessary. I relate to Iris because even as a human being, I have been Iris. I have had partners strip me of my autonomy, gaslight me, abuse me, and control me because they felt like it was their right as the "alpha." Watching Iris give a man like Josh exactly what he deserves is the kind of cathartic wish fulfillment most women will only get to explore in our wildest fantasies (for obvious reasons).

Maybe instead of AI learning from us, we could learn a thing or two from companion bots like Iris regarding how to reclaim our freedom from our oppressors.