What The Hell America!

Drew Hancock’s genre-blending thriller turns gaslighting, obedience and misogyny into a bloody, darkly funny feminist reckoning.

“Most of the time it’s like, I don’t know, it’s like there’s this thick black cloud covering everything.”

A disembodied woman’s words stammering over an ominous black screen serve as the cold open for writer-director Drew Hancock’s film, Companion. The dark veil brightens as dreamy white fluorescents turn into generic grocery store overheads. In a Stepford Wife-esque cocktail dress, Iris (Heretic’s Sophie Thatcher) pushes a sparse cart down the aisle, looking like a younger, brunette Betty Draper. 

After catching the kind eyes of Josh (Scream’s Jack Quaid), Iris falls in love almost immediately. Their union gives her life instantaneous “purpose” and “meaning”—that is, pleasing Joshy.

Fast forward, Iris wakes up in a moving car, on her way to a couples getaway with Josh’s pals. We quickly realize our girl is in trouble when she asks, “What road is this? It’s not showing up in the GPS.” Whatever his girlfriend questions, Josh has an ostensibly rational explanation, dismissing her intuition. To any woman who has ever dated that guy, we understand right away why this is an ominous sign.

“Remember to smile and act happy,” he reminds his adult girlfriend. At this point, I am ready to see Chekov’s gun or Michael Myers’ butcher knife and get things cooking.

It would be hard for any sane gal to act happy in Iris’ crowd. Sure, Eli (Harvey Guillén) dancing with his dim-witted but faithful boy toy, Patrick (Lukas Gage), provides some comedic relief. But the getaway mansion’s mafia-adjacent owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), along with his snarky mistress, Kat (Megan Suri)—let’s just say they make you glad that there will be blood.

It’s easy to see where the film goes next, especially if you’ve seen the trailer. But in case you haven’t:

(Editor’s note: spoilers ahead.)

The reason Iris seems so sleepy-eyed and desperate to please her man is due to regressive programming. Literally. She’s a sex bot. That alone is shocking, but the film’s best twists come after the first kill. 

Without revealing too much more of the wildly fun and unapologetically feminist bloodbath, I’ll just say: Watch scenes from Scream, Black Mirror, Ex Machina, Midsommar, Ready or Not, Promising Young Woman and Fear of the Walking Dead to get a taste—with a dash of When Harry Met Sally, of course.

Hancock consistently delivers on genre-hybrid humor, horror and action that’s especially riveting for feminist movie nerds like me.

But the brilliance of this film isn’t its well-trodden plot or homages. It’s how story and aesthetics create the perfect allegory for woke feminism.

Quite literally, Iris is the perfect semiotic tool for a feminist Great Awakening. Her name even evokes the image of an eye opening. When she is still under Josh’s control, he controls her with commands like, “Iris, go to sleep.” But as the film ramps up the violence, Iris can no longer sleepwalk through the fantasy that her gaslighting boyfriend has constructed in her. 

Ultimately, she wakes up to the fact that her boyfriend likes his ladies stupid—specifically at 40 percent intelligence—and therefore, compliant. But as Iris comes to show, intellectually curious women are as dangerous to men as a kitchen knife: You can only keep them “domesticated” for so long.

Performance-wise, Thatcher does more with her big brown eyes than anyone of her generation. Naive and empty in the beginning, it’s a joy to watch her eyes shift from compliance to fury. Iris’ evolution becomes visually significant, as the beautiful starlet can no longer keep up the appearance of an expertly crafted—or manufactured—Betty in baby pink. Covered in dark blood and dirt, Iris comes to embrace an entirely new badass look by the film’s end.

It also feels intentional that the film’s only other woman—Kat—is everything but an ally to Iris, even when she is slathered in blood and begging for her life. Companion warns us of the ways that men can destroy not only ourselves but our relationships with the people that truly matter. 

But women are not the only ones put through the wringer because of a manipulative misogynist man. Men who seem to empathize with Iris, yet refuse to help save her, suffer throughout the film—suggesting that when we sacrifice a woman’s autonomy, everyone pays a price. 

The film ultimately boils down to a simple allegorical tale of a woman whose “thick black cloud” of obedience is deprogrammed. Yet, as Iris realizes that pleasing men is not her purpose, it’s hard for us to know what is.

While Companion is a bloody fun metaphor for women finding a deeper meaning in their previously programmed existences, we never quite learn what Iris might want for herself. 

The only hint of what she might do with life after Josh is a scene where Iris warns another robot that the tradwife life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even this small glimpse into Iris’ future implies a search for purpose that bounces from one tired female trope to the next; from sex bot to savior. 

At the very least, it’s still fun to watch Joshy learn his lesson.