Recently I reviewed the 2024 thriller Abigail, noting that its core premise was one best left unknown when viewing the film for the first time. Here we are again with Companion, a 2025 thriller that essentially plays an identical trick. The less you know about the film, the better I think your experience will be.

Iris (Sophie Thatcher) accompanies her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) on a weekend getaway with his friends in the country. Iris is uncomfortable, feeling Josh’s friends look down on her for some reason. When their host Sergey (Rupert Friend) takes an unsavoury interest in Iris, she is pushed into an extreme situation more terrifying than she could have imagined.

This is an excellent and tensely composed thriller, presenting a provocative story of gender relationship and power games. The acting is uniformly excellent, with Thatcher and Quaid in particular well cast. Its presentation is slick, and the twists and turns of the narrative executed with efficiency and a compounding sense of runaway disaster. Any superficiality in interrogating the film’s premise is honestly compensated by how slickly writer/director Drew Hancock plays it all out. To enjoy the film without having any of its surprises ruined, finish reading now and check it out; it is one of 2025’s best films of its kind.

The big surprise, of course, is that unlike other recent thrillers about male power or weekend getaways going horrendously wrong (Promising Young Woman, Sissy, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Birdeater), Companion is a stealth science fiction movie. Iris does not realise that she isn’t even human: she is a Companion, an artificially intelligence but easily modified robot used by lonely humans for romantic friendship and sexual intercourse. She is hard-coded to show pronounced affection to her owner, Josh, who can freely adjust her intelligence, voice, physical attributes, and other factors with a smartphone app. Josh’s friends do not treat her as an equal because in their mind she is not. The trauma of discovering her boyfriend is not the likeable, good-hearted person she thought he was is compounded here by questions of self-awareness and humanity, of freedom and control, and of the notion of free will. The film’s consideration of the ethics of AI push it away from the aforementioned gendered thrillers and closer to the likes of Alex Garland’s excellent 2014 film Ex Machina. The film feels mostly very smart; more importantly it feels timely.

Revelations of Josh’s real motives, and his plans to manipulate Iris in a criminal conspiracy spark off a farrago of misfortunes. There are more unexpected revelations beyond the first one, and a growing body count as things progressive get worse and worse for Josh’s master plan. There is an unexpected level of black comedy filtered through the thrills, and a weaving plot that keeps the suspense up throughout.

The excellent cast also includes Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, and Marc Menchasa. The near-future design is slick and subtle. Eli Born’s photography is tremendous.

There is a minor frustration in recommending the film, since revealing it to be perhaps the year’s best science fiction film also spoils a large part of the suspense in initially viewing it. All one can do is enthuse about it generally, and hope that its most enthusiastic audience stumble onto it on their own.