“Companion”: Sophie Thatcher Shines In A Smart Twisted Film | Review
From the first moment I heard about “Companion” and saw the poster, I had expectations. Although there’s no familiar name behind the camera here, and the marketing of the film focused on the fact that it is from the “creators of” (in this case, “Barbarian”) and the “studios that brought” (in our case, “The Notebook”), there was something about the poster that featured the talented Sophie Thatcher in shades of pink, with a mysterious look and eyes that were too white, that attracted me. And, of course, the caption “Find someone made just for you” also took me in interesting directions. I thought it was perhaps another film about someone who isn’t exactly normal and who kills someone for various reasons
From the plot description, I tried to figure out whether it was even a horror movie, or if you will, whether we had found another example of a horror movie with romantic aspects, which could be suitable for a date or for watching with a woman who, despite all its perfect advantages, doesn’t connect with horror movies and prefers romantic comedies or reality love series (of course, it has nothing to do with my private life. Absolutely not).
Expectations rose when “Companion” hit the screens because the film received excellent reviews. But then came the warning, which I like very much as a viewer of horror movies but less so as someone who likes to analyze them or even write about them: approaching them as a “clean slate” without knowing too much about what to expect, in terms of plot or even the specific genre.
So I approached the movie with as little prior information as possible – between us, I prefer to avoid watching trailers anyway – and I tried to form an opinion about “Companion.” The good news is that the film hypnotized me for an hour and a half, presented an intriguing plot full of twists and turns, and highlighted some talents that could star in horror cinema in recent years.
What Is Companion About? (Or: The Impossible Promotion Of The Film)
“Companion” is the kind of film recommended to go to without prior knowledge. The problem is that this task is complex today, sometimes even impossible. The film has many twists, the first after as little as twenty minutes. It has to do with Iris’s true identity – the main character, played by Thatcher – which, as you can deduce from the poster or the trailer, is not exactly ordinary.
The simplest thing is to kill the creators’ marketing efforts, as many did, for example, in the case of “Abigail” (this time rightly so), which inserted a central twist into every decent part of the PR efforts. From my point of view, the picture is more complex and less precise. I assume there were long discussions about what exactly to reveal to the audience and how because they needed to desire to discover the film. After all, it comes with an unknown director and an excellent cast – who will also be familiar to horror fans – but not ones still considered crowd-pullers or stars. The dilemma is how much to tell the audience in advance. A possible solution is to reveal enough to intrigue the audience and help them understand what the film is about, bring the revelation relatively early, and allow for other, more significant revelations. “Companion” did this with partial success in several respects.
At first, a teaser trailer arrived that did a great job because it presented key scenes from the film but maintained a mystery about the plot. If we take a few examples, I’m not sure that the campaign is as brilliant as what we saw in the case of “Longlegs” or “Smile” films, but it certainly aroused anticipation among those who saw it.
It may have been possible to settle for that, but at a certain point – for reasons that may be logical, from the creators’ perspective – another trailer arrived that already spoon-fed the viewer some of the ideas and developments in the plot, including some revelations that appear in relatively advanced parts of the film. Therefore, I am including the later trailer here as a service to the horror-loving public, but with a clear warning: If you want to avoid spoilers, I recommend that you avoid watching it. You can skip the trailer altogether or at least give priority to the teaser.
The Plot Of Companion (Or: You Can’t Tell)
For these reasons, writing a review of “Companion” is difficult without giving away too much. But still, we can say that we meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher), who already mentions in the opening credits that the first happy moment of her life was her meeting with Josh (Jack Quaid) and the second – the day she murdered him.
We see the scene of their meeting in the supermarket, which looks like it came out of an unreliable romantic drama, with a clumsy guy who drops all the oranges (a metaphor for something?), shy dialogue, crossed looks, an embarrassed smile, and so on. Later, we realized that this is not a coincidence. In any case, after the initial meeting, we accompany the couple in love on their trip for a vacation at the weekend cabin of a guy with a little too much money, alongside some of Josh’s best friends.
This is the starting point of many horror films: a meeting of friends in an isolated place that gets out of control. Sometimes, there is a triggering event, which can connect to many elements, such as an object that the friends find in the locations (“Tarot,” “The Blackening,” “It’s What’s Inside”), a social game that turns into a realistic horror movie (“Bodies Bodies Bodies,” “Truth or Dare”), a hedonistic lifestyle that hides horrific secrets (“Blink Twice”), and so on. In the process, we are exposed to various revelations, developing dynamics between the characters, and power struggles that significantly shorten the path to murder.
The creators can take these settings in different directions on a plot level, making the movie more profound and relevant to our time, such as homosexual and heterosexual relationships, men versus women, whites versus blacks, human versus nonhuman, adults versus children, and so on. “Companion” also operates on several levels, which we will not reveal to you at this stage. They are not surprising, considering the point in time we are in.
Then something violent happens in the forest, revealing to us who exactly Iris is: This revelation of the identity of the “perfect girl” won’t rock your world, given the “early information” we mentioned earlier, but it’s just the starting point. We understand there is a particular plan involving that girl, but along the way, a few more twists – some predictable and some a little less- cause the film to change genres and styles.
When Different Ideas Combined
It is complicated to define “Companion” if we want to avoid spoilers. On the one hand, as you can deduce from the fact that it appears on our website that it has several killings (some of them detailed) and contains impressive amounts of blood, it is a horror film. But it can also be seen as a science fiction drama, a psychological thriller, a black comedy, a romance film with a twist, and more.
Its ideas are not particularly original; we have already seen some in other films. If you like, it’s like “Barbarian” (the poster and trailer emphasize that the film is from “The Creators of Barbarian”) meets “Ready or Not” or “Becky,” which meets “Terminator,” “Ex Machina,” or “Megan,” which meets a Tarantino-style crime drama like “Reservoir Dogs.”
If we consider the plot as a meeting between genres, we could perhaps argue that it is a kind of romantic drama (the film is from “The Studios That Brought You The Notebook”) about a mysterious meeting of friends in a cabin, which at a certain point turns into a horror film whose basis is unrealistic (but just a little). At some point, the film becomes a crime thriller with a malicious plan that some characters are complicit in, which traditionally includes secrets, betrayals, and murders. It is not clear who will come out alive and who will return with all the money.
Sophie Thatcher: A Horror Star In The Making
The cast of “Companion” does an excellent job, with some very prominent names in horror cinema in recent years. In the leading role, Sophie Thatcher is a tremendous talent still not well-known. She stars as the younger version of Natalie in “Yellowjackets,” perhaps one of the only sympathetic characters in this series (quite intentionally, I suppose). She is the only memorable thing in the deadly routine “The Boogeyman,” and she plays a significant role in “Heretic” as one of the two girls who arrive at Hugh Grant’s house and realize that he not only talks people to death but also kills them.
She expressed a lot of emotion in all these roles thanks to her acting skills, precise facial expressions, and eyes (that is, when they are not frighteningly white). Although the script also intends for her to be a character who is much easier to identify with than the other characters who are different from her in some way, there is no doubt that Thatcher steals the show again. She demonstrates charisma and a sense of comedy, can look scared but tough in the next scene, presents an impressive emotional range, and, most importantly, builds a character that we want to come out on top of, which is unnatural considering her characteristics.
The Cast Of Companion: Some Talents We’ve Already Met
Jack Quaid, the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is best known for one of the leading roles in the Amazon Prime Video series “The Boys,” based on a comic book about a group of young people who take the law into their own hands and fight corrupt superheroes. We’ve seen him in several voiceover roles (mainly from the comic book worlds), in supporting roles in films like “The Hunger Games” and “Oppenheimer,” but in our context, also in horror films: in “Tragedy Girls,” which we recently reviewed in an article about cheerleading films, we saw him as the boyfriend of the two insufferable girls and the son of the sheriff. In the fifth “Scream” film, he is the boyfriend of the heroine Sam (Melissa Barrera) and keeps a few secrets (ammmm) to himself.
In “Companion,” Quaid plays the character of the seemingly charming guy but a bit creepy and mean-looking. The film tries to convince us that he’s not such an a-hole or at least that his behavior has reasons. Here, I saw a specific problem, perhaps due to the script, because the film would have benefited if we had received a deeper character or one that was easier to identify with.
The rest of the cast is certainly interesting. Lukas Gage (“The White Lotus,” “You,” and especially the blood dealer who starts Naomi Scott’s horror in “Smile 2”) stands out here as Patrick, a handsome homosexual with a few secrets of his own. He has a relationship with Eli (Harvey Guillén, “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Werewolves Within,” and an openly queer person in real life), in which something also seems a little strange. Although Gage starts as a familiar stereotype of a homosexual in movies, his character undergoes significant development for various reasons related to the plot. He presents this transformation pretty well.
You’ll also find the sexy but very bitchy Kat (American actress of Indian origin Megan Suri, “It Lives Inside,” “Missing”) and Sergey, the Russian guy who looks a bit like a mobster (British Rupert Friend, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “The Young Victoria” and soon “Jurassic World Rebirth”), whose the gang stat in his vacation cabin for a specific purpose that we’ll understand later.
Throughout the film, we discover power struggles, or sometimes secrets, between these friends. It feels a bit like a reality show, with subplots about the married billionaire who sleeps with the supposedly bitchy girl, who is Josh’s friend but doesn’t like Iris or even people in general. The film saves some revelations about the characters and why they came together here for its advanced parts, some interesting and some less significant.
Another problem is that some of the characters are not developed enough or behave in the way we expect from their appearance or general typecast.
There Is Talent Behind The Camera
“Companion” was directed and written by Drew Hancock, a name that probably doesn’t tell you anything at this point. “Companion” is his first full-length film. In his relatively short filmography, you will find the direction of one short “film”: a short musical comedy (about 9 minutes) called “Tenacious D: Time Fixers,” part of the promotional campaign of the Grammy-winning band “Tenacious D,” behind which stand actor Jack Black and musician Kyle Gass. “Companion” shows that he has talent as a director and writer. So I am curious about his following projects (he will, by the way, write the script for the remake of “The Faculty,” which will be produced by Robert Rodriguez).
“Companion” maintains more or less the same style even when it switches between genres. This fact shows that there is a skilled hand behind the camera, but also makes the film different in this sense from, for example, “Barbarian,” which is mentioned (rightly) in the film’s promotional campaigns, where there were several separate episodes with a distinctly different style.
The soundtrack is enjoyable and puts us in the right mood, with Several segments in which Sophie Thatcher contributed background vocals and, of course, also “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, which is connected to the film thanks to the character’s name, but also the fact that the film corresponds ironically with the kitschy romantic dramas that this song relates to. The cinematography by Eli Born (“The Boogeyman,” “No One Will Save You”) is impressive, with the right combination of close-ups, atmospheric shots and more dynamic shots.
“Companion” is not scary but has violence and gore. It raises points for thought regarding questions such as who is good and who is bad, or even who is real or fake. There are moments when the film is funny, and in others, it seems like a deliberate parody, for better or worse (primarily for better, in my opinion).
Hancock takes conventions from different films and combines them in a clever, even if imperfect, way: the pace is uneven throughout the film, and sometimes the tone does not match what we see on the screen. A few scenes were too fast or were put together unevenly (for example, the first attack scene), reducing the tension or even fear level they provided.
Many Ideas, Some Decent (Beware, Semi-Spoilers!)
Some would say that the messages of “Companion” are unoriginal – and in the following paragraphs, unfortunately, there will be some general spoilers. Generally, you can see the film as another film that shows us the problematic nature of technology, especially when it tries to replace humans. It would be more accurate to say that it shows the complicated nature of humans attempting to exploit technology for purposes it was not intended, from replacing human relationships to trying to commit terrible acts and blaming it on the developments surrounding us.
“Companion” can be seen as another product in a rather long list of films that show how technologies that have gotten out of control become a horror films, reflexively or not. Whether it’s an artificial intelligence system that’s meant to be a companion to a damaged child but becomes murderous when someone tries to take her place (“Megan”), helping with household chores but also taking the mother’s place in her husband’s life and bed (“Subservience”), or simply getting out of control and destroying the house (“Margaux,” “Afraid,” “House/Wife).”
This idea is not new because a few decades ago, we saw films that featured, for example, a cyborg assassin and a soldier sent from the future and taking part in the fight against artificial intelligence (“Terminator,” which the film references in more than one way), to objects that have become murderous such as dolls, an elevator, a car, and so on.
These fears will become more tangible as the years progress, so what seemed like pure science fiction in the 80s and 90s becomes a much more realistic and mainly pessimistic film today. It appears you modify the characteristics and properties of developments, technologies, and products of artificial intelligence at the push of a button, But the film shows that even such developments can have their desires or interests that are necessarily connected to those of the user.
The film takes the confusion between human and artificial products a few steps further – perhaps an extension of the theoretical idea of the Turing Test, which the scientist Alan Turing proposed back in the 1950s. It asks not only whether it is easy to distinguish a person from something else but also whether this something else can have feelings or whether it is capable of taking on a life of its own and transcending its creator (which was also present in classic monster movies, such as Frankenstein, of course), or in this case its buyer.
Should You Watch Companion?
Ultimately, “Companion” is not a perfect film. But thanks to a captivating idea (even if not too new), a clever script full of surprises (even if some of them come too soon or are expected), impressive performances from the cast, and one Sophie Thatcher, who is on her way to possibly becoming one of the most prominent horror stars of the coming years, it manages to be one of the best horror films we saw lately.
It’s very easy to understand why critics and audiences loved this film. It received excellent reviews – a rating of over 90% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Financially, it has so far grossed a handsome – if not astronomical – sum of about $35 million, quickly making it triple its budget (about $10 million).
Don’t expect a bombastic result or a groundbreaking film here. In fact, don’t expect anything because prior knowledge can only ruin it. You should give “Companion” a chance because this film is delightful.
Companion (2025) – Frequently Asked Questions
Who directed Companion? The director of Companion is Drew Hancock, a relatively unknown name. Yet
Who plays in Companion? The cast of Companion includes Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend, and more.
Who wrote Companion? Drew Hancock
How long is Companion? The running time of the movie is about 97 minutes.
Where was Companion filmed? United States
What languages are spoken in Companion? English
When was Companion released? The movie’s release date in the United States was January 31, 2025.
What was the budget of Companion? Approx. $10 million
How much Companion grossed? The movie grossed approximately. $35 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
What is Companion’s MPAA rating (Parental guide)? The movie is rated R for intense violence, sexual content, and language throughout.
What do the reviews say about Companion? The film currently holds an impressive rating of 7.0 on IMDB, meaning the audience liked it. The critic as well, since it has 94% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer).
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