Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Ingénue of the moment Sophie Thatcher, recently of Heretic, stars as a robot designed to provide a girlfriend experience in this tonally jumpy mix of horror, comedy and social commentary. Sex-bot Iris’s on-demand subservience — with her inbuilt intelligence dialled down to an unthreatening 40 per cent — echoes that of the 1970s Stepford wives. This time round, however, her role is not so much an observation on the status of women as it is an X-ray exposure of her male owner’s dark side. Josh’s cute smile masks a roiling storm of male supremacism that Iris is programmed to suit.We join them on a weekend break at a secluded lakeside lodge, the property of Russian billionaire Sergey (Rupert Friend). The guest list includes his scheming girlfriend Kat (Megan Suri), Josh and Iris and the cuddly Eli (Harvey Guillén), whose boyfriend is the suspiciously perfect Patrick (Lukas Gage). Josh is harbouring a nefarious plan — poorly conceived, of course, coming from his soggy human brain — that involves reprogramming Iris as a controlled weapon. What he doesn’t realise is that, like the replicants in Blade Runner, she has more emergent feelings than are proper to a robot. Mostly, she wants to be free. With her hitherto erased aggression dialled up to 11, her intelligence restored and a knife in her pocket, Iris starts her rampage towards release.A robot that turns against its puny human controller is hardly a new idea, but the current anxiety around AI obviously gives Companion topical punch. Otherwise, it veers between the comic and visceral. The colours are Barbie-bright, right down to the pink title sequence; writer-director Drew Hancock is similarly aiming to give us sexual politics in a popcorn box, but with added stage blood. Thatcher is fine, her tiny frame and bee-stung lips a credible bot template, but Friend’s Sergey is more fun: with his mullet, loose satin dressing gown and bachelor’s pad, he has a 1970s caddishness that, from the distance of 2025, is a bit of a hoot. ★★★☆☆In cinemas from January 31
