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‘Companion’ Review: Smarter Than ‘M3GAN,’ but Still No ‘Ex Machina,’ Sophie Thatcher’s AI-Themed Thriller Makes for a Clever Late-January Surprise
Debuting director Drew Hancock manipulates anxieties about the rise of the machines in a clever and darkly satirical thriller co-starring Jack Quaid.
It’s a doomed-to-fail excursion, since Iris tends to feel insecure around the other guests, which include Josh’s ex Kat (Megan Suri) and her creepy Russian sugar daddy Sergey (Rupert Friend), as well as their catty gay pal Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his endearingly dim toy boy Patrick (Lukas Gage). That’s a gimmick, obviously, since the cast is made up entirely of real people, but it allows the filmmaker to frame the way Iris is treated as a case of extreme gaslighting, where everyone is complicit in hiding her true purpose — to indulge Josh’s kinks and laugh at his jokes. As far back as 1972, in one year, Ira Levin published “The Stepford Wives” and Michael Crichton wrote the script for “Westworld,” indicating a pop-culture moment half a century ago when folks were worried about the use and abuse of machines that could be played by people, and which were sympathetic enough for audiences to care about their fates.
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