An Incomplete Guide to Companion
And the best Black Mirror episodes
COMPANION
Black Mirror will be back on our screens this year, which is always good news. My ex and I found that the beauty of Black Mirror is that you get movie-sized ideas, usually done in an hour or less. All of the fun without the commitment. Some Black Mirror episodes genuinely don’t feel long enough, a rare thing in a world where films seem to be getting longer. Sometimes, Black Mirror episodes pitch an exciting idea, great drama, and a wonderful conceit impacting characters that have made their mark on you with great efficiency in the writing and storytelling, and then… it doesn’t know what to do with them. For example, when Hayley Atwell gets a sex-robot version of her deceased husband that she falls in love with but can’t return a human connection to her (2013’s Be Right Back), she can’t bare to kill the thing she’s addicted to, and the episode ends with the droid just living in her attic, that mother and infant daughter just visit, rather than finding an ending to.
Companion feels like one of those Black Mirror episodes. The exciting difference is that because it’s a movie, writer/director Drew Hancock finds a great narrative arc and a very satisfying ending. It’s a great feature debut from Hancock.
It’s been over a week since I saw Companion. Its cinema release window is already diminished as I write this, so apologies if you find it hard to find, but sometimes, it takes a while for the thoughts to simmer before I can come up with a few hundred words on the subject. All of this is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it as some solid, and pleasingly tight (okay, short), popcorn fun.
The trailer and, arguably, the poster give away the key plot twist, but it’s also quite difficult to talk about the plot without the game-changing twist that the film hinged upon about 20 minutes in. There’s a debate to be had about how much you give away in a trailer. In a time when cinema audience numbers are trending downwards, you can forgive movies like Captain America: Brave New World making a lot of fuss about Harrison Ford becoming the Red Hulk, but that doesn’t happen in the movie until the last 15 minutes, with the foreshadowing throughout clearly hoping that the audience is ready for a great big surprise. Well, it wasn’t. A product’s relationship with the consumer starts with the marketing and communications strategy: Brave New World’s was problematic from the start.
Elsewhere, independent movies like Companion are begging to be noticed (that said, A24’s continued successes do beg the question of at what point we’re going to
Companion opens on a charming meet-cute between Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid), in a gorgeously over-stylized, saturated with warm colours and noticeably silent supermarket. Everything about it, from framing, to music, feels cute, but also signals that something’s not right, and fills you with impending dread.
From there, we go to the weekend away that the couple are having at their friend’s friend Sergey’s, (Rupert Friend on fantastic over the top form), lakeside house. No one trusts Iris, and she cannot work out why. Sergey, the Russian mafia man whose house they’re staying in, nearly sexually assaults her by the beach, and Iris returns to the house covered in blood, devastated and traumatised by what’s happened, having killed the attacker. Then… she’s switched off.
Iris is a customizeable companion robot that Josh treats like a girlfriend and sex slave, and he has jailbroken her programming to allow her to harm others. From there, a conspiracy thriller unravels. I fear I have said too much already, but the result is a game of cat and mouse which gets particularly satisfying when Iris uses Josh’s phone to adjust her intelligence setting from 40% to 100%.
The result is a glorious and gory satirical romp. Sophie Thatcher is on a roll, after holding firm against the sinister stylings of Hugh Grant in Heretic at the end of last year, and now creating a new mould for portraying a robot here. Her movements are balletically stiff. It’s a measured yet unpredictable performance and achieved vulnerability that one doesn’t normally associate with an artificial intelligence character. What sets her apart is that she’s utterly convinced of her own reality and soul, and her ingenuity and sheer vulnerability. She’s been taken advantage of, and even though she’s only a robot, she feels like a real person.
Companion is a hell of a lot of fun. The cat-and-mouse game of death that ensues and sees the combatants chasing each other around the lake and its lucious house ramps up nicely, never going too far. The twists come thick and fast and treat the audience as intelligent.
More of this, please!
Companion is in cinemas now
Black Mirror episodes you shoud watch again!
I know that absolutely no-one is thinking about Black Mirror right now, there having not been any new episodes for nearly two years, but Companion got me thinking about it, and it is one of the great shows.
THE NATIONAL ANTHEM (S1E1)
The original, you might say. Notorious for being the one where a Prime Minister put his facilities in a pig, something that was then alleged of then-Prime-Minister, David Cameron in a book by Lord Ashcroft as an activity he participated in during his student days.
Prescient for being not so much about technology, but about the capacity for unhinged events being something we can’t stop looking at, it’s still a corker of a piece of satire. Rory Kinnear has played another Prime Minister (who’s clearly a bit more an analogous of Boris Johnson) on Netflix’s Diplomat since!
WHITE BEAR (S2E2)
Easily one of the most creepy and accomplished of the Channel 4 era. The zombie thriller where two women are constantly on the run from people hunting them, and constantly being filmed on phones. Full of paranoia and featuring one of the greatest twists, it’s an absolutely incredible and disturbing ride.
SAN JUNIPERO (S3E4)
One of the more iconic and stylized entries from the first seson to air on Netflix nearly 9 years ago now (bloody hell!). Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis star as Kelly and Yorkie in this time distorted romance as they keep meeting in a simulated reality of San Junipero. One of the more positive depictions of the power of technology as they fear their loss of humanity as they come to only know each other as their simulated digital selves. One of the few to have what you might call a happy ending in the Black Mirror world.
USS CALLISTER (S4E1)
Rumour has it that we’re getting a sequel to this episode in the upcoming season. A really tight and amusing thriller, taking on gaming and the capacity for men to control what little reality that a gaming space let’s them have in a dark and disturbing way, and downright hilarious as a result. A send up of Star Trek whilst featuring hefty and intense satire, with standout performances from Jesse Plemons and Cristin Milioti, it’s a fan favourite for a reason, and a hell of lot of fun.
LOCH HENRY (S6E2)
A grim tale of young people making a student film, in the vein of true crime podcasts, who uncover something much more horrible than the myths that they’re chasing. Deep in the Scottish countryside, less about screens than about the secrets and the commercialisation of true crime, an investigation into the soul of a society that consumes such horrific stories as casual entertainment, this could have been a two hour movie, but thank god you don’t have to spend any more time than it’s tight 54 minutes.
DEMON 79 (S6E5)
And now for something completely different! Intentionally stylized as ‘Red Mirror’, a 1970’s style horror film, where the technological horror isn’t so much an addiction or something deep in our souls, but a Demon (Pappa Essiedu, absolutely dynamic in the role) instructing Nida (We Are Lady Parts’ Ajana Vasan, giving a quiet but powerful performance) to murder three people or the world will end. In the 2020s, there’s only so much time we want to spend being horrified by the social and psychological effects of technology and social media, so Charlie Brooker taking us back to the past a lot in series 6 reminds us that a lot of the problems we face were there before, and the media world has only emphasised the bad seeds, not created all of the issues.
All of Black Mirror is on Netflix. Fancy a movie scale idea and plot with only half the runtime? Dive back into a random episode and comment your favourites below!