Guest Post: Companion (2025)

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Humanity goes on trial in the latest black-comedy thriller film Companion, and it does NOT paint us in a good light. A satire on toxic masculinity, this latest by Producer Zach Cregger of Barbarian is crisp, acerbic, and predictive of man’s eminent extinction.

 

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) dreads spending the weekend with her boyfriend, Josh’s, judgy gang of friends. She worships the handsome Josh (Jake Quaid), so against her better judgment, she willingly goes along to meet his friends, though she thinks everyone looks down their noses at her. She arrives and Josh’s bestie Kat (Megan Suri) makes snide comments, while she gets unwanted attention from the owner of the isolated house, Sergey (Rupert Friend). Little does Iris know she’s being set up for something nefarious that will question everything she knows about herself, her boyfriend, and civilization itself.

 

Writer/Director Drew Hancock, who wrote for the clever ABC comedy Suburgatory makes his directorial debut here, and he has a great sense of comic timing. The affluent home, the wooded surroundings, all play into the satire but also give a creepy otherness. He puts Thatcher in soft focus unlike the other characters, giving her an ethereal essence -- Hancock borrows visually from Brian Forbes’ 1975 adaptation of Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. The gore is limited, but when it comes, it’s inventive. He also plants seeds in his script that flower into great set pieces.  The commentary on love as transient in the “love lock” sequence is spot on. 

 

There does seem to be a huge disconnect between the script and marketing. The script hints at the reveals with incisive dialogue and camera movements, which all seems for naught when the poster, trailer, and marketing EPKs gives the first twist away immediately. Hancock may have been better off ripping the Band-Aid off in the first moments or hiring the marketers for The Crying Game.

 

Thatcher, fresh off the success of Heretic, has the audience in the palm of her hand the entire film. She’s an endearing protagonist, tough, but vulnerable. Quaid is pitch perfect in mocking his mother Meg Ryan’s 90’s romcoms, exposing the flip side of the perfect lover.  Harvey Guillén (What We Do In The Shadows) is hilariously flippant as the gay best friend, who shatters the sexless gay cliche (sort-of) from those earlier romcoms by bringing along his own true love (Lucas Gage). 

 

Horror has always wrestled with the question “what is humanity?” Is it flesh and blood? Is it empathy? Is it an entitlement to those who walk the earth? Companion clearly believes the answer: humanity is bunk, and not worth saving.