Movie Night: Companion (2025)

“Companion” favors in-your-face storytelling over nuance—delivering sharp humor and social allegory, shouting its message from the rooftops.

Horror is not generally known for its subtlety. Of course, there are plenty of nuanced horror movies that defy this stereotype­­, ones as open to interpretation as they are an allegory for something concrete. These are the horror movies that often garner praise, often dubbed (spits on the ground and makes the sign of the cross) ‘elevated horror.’

Still, the critical and financial success of 2024’s The Substance, a movie about as subtle in its massaging as a slap around the face with C4, proves that in an increasingly politically charged environment, there is a space for blunt horror that leaves little room for misunderstanding.

Companion joins The Substance in being a concept horror that, while offering thrills and enjoyment, sometimes trips over itself in really, really wanting its audience to get what it is saying.

From the moment we meet Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher), we sense that there is something a little superficial about their relationship. When they arrive with some friends at the house of Russian billionaire Sergei (played to hilarious effect by Rupert Friend), what began as superficial borders on creepy.

After Sergei is murdered and the other guests appear all too willing to throw Iris under the bus, her retaliation upsets the power balance of the group, and its internal relationships are revealed to be based on cruelly immoral lies.

This all sounds a little grim, but where Companion really excels is in its humor. 

The movie is about systems of power, but those who appear to be in control are often shown to be hapless idiots who blunder from one situation to the next with little going through their minds except greed.

Their entitlement is what drives them on, but it also blinds them with an illusion of competence to which their actions never correspond.

Jack Quaid transitioned from sad puppy in Amazon’s The Boys to angry incel in Paramount’s Scream franchise, and Josh combines both to be right up there with the most easily hateable characters in cinema.

Elsewhere, Eli (Harvey Guillén) is a loveable idiot whose relationship with Patrick (Lukas Gage), while still entirely shady, provides one of the few instances of genuine heart in a movie that is otherwise proudly cynical.

If Sophie Thatcher isn’t officially a scream queen already, it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

It’s hard to think of a young actress working right now who is better at transitioning from fragile to badass and back again. More than that, though, Thatcher has a way of ‘wearing’ her psychological pain that makes you immediately want to root for her. While her turns in Showtime’s Yellowjackets and 2024’s Heretic show those skills already at work, in Companion, she seems at her most vulnerable, with the power structures constantly stacked against her so that every confrontation is tense and every escape narrow.

This, in tandem with some great humor and solid acting, makes Companion consistently fun to watch.

The film’s real weakness is its heavy-handedness. In the first instance, this comes in the form of clumsy foreshadowing, making it possible for the audience to guess with a fair degree of accuracy what is going to happen before it does.

See this voice-activated car? Yeah, that’s definitely going to be important. See this thing that is not really a weapon but can totally be used as a weapon? Oh boy, you’re gonna want to stay tuned for this!

It’s difficult to say more without revealing spoilers (and unfortunately, Companion’s biggest surprise is already ruined by its poster), but needless to say, this predictability does take the punch out of some of the tenser scenes.

As in The Substance, there are also flashbacks that feel like they are spoon-feeding the story to the audience, just in case they get lost during the 90-minute runtime.

As mentioned at the start, the second heavy-handed element of Companion is its messaging.

Although it isn’t quite as thrown (or squirted) in your face as it is in The Substance, there are certain times when it feels like the film is literally leaning over to you and being like ‘if you know what I’m saying’ (*wink, wink*).

The real power dynamics of relationships, even when hegemonic and abusive, are complicated, but the allegory here is one so black and white that it barely functions.

It could be argued that the extreme transparency of films like Companion and The Substance is the product of a political sphere that has become such a rigid binary that it excludes nuanced takes. Or perhaps it’s simply that streaming (where all films end up and reach their widest audience) is a medium of passive viewing that necessitates telegraphed themes.

Either way, it leaves very little for film aficionados, sipping their coffee and brooding darkly as they deconstruct the movie they have just seen. Also, they are wearing a beret.

Despite this ‘back in my day’ lament for deeper narrative, Companion is an enjoyable and well-constructed film that still offers thrills and laughter. Its dinner table denouement may not deliver any real surprises, but just like the film itself, it is fun to watch even if you always knew it would end up this way—which is certainly more than can be said for the emerging reality it portrays