‘Companion’ is certainly a zeitgeist film, embodying our obsession with the world of AI and chatbots, in this case presenting us with authentic-seeming humans who turn out to be androids and who can be made to have higher or lower levels of intelligence, to speak a foreign language, tor even to kill, all via a quick swipe or press on a phone app. In many ways, this world is familiar to us from Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’, Spielberg’s ‘A.I.’ and even the unfairly maligned Chris Columbus feature ‘Bicentennial Man’.

But ‘Companion’ brings those ‘robots are the future’ dynamic to #MeToo politics, asking questions about the way in which an abuse of power lies at the heart of all relationship structures, with questions of free will and agency thrown into the mix by asking whether or not it might be possible to change the power imbalance. In this case, it is posed by giving us a female robot who develops the capacity to release herself from the control of her male partner and to seek restitution from the carnage he has wrought. Like ‘Blink Twice’, what we really have here is a pretty straightforward and generic revenge narrative where the tables are turned and the female gets to change places with the male narcissist who up until this point has called the shots.

This does have elements of chase and conspiracy, and there are some scenes here where we are never entirely sure who is in control and whether Iris (Sophie Thatcher) will have the capacity to fight back. Where this film flounders, though, is in the way it feels like another knock-off of ‘Don’t Worry Darling’, another drama about sexual and gender relations with a sci-fi twist, and it soon becomes weary once we realize that the outwardly nice Josh (Jack Quaid) is really a creepy, controlling narcissist. John Huston in ‘Chinatown’ he is not, and ‘Companion’ is a film that does not offer much by way of character depth or any real sense of venality or corruption to underscore its narrative.

The only significant twist is that here it is not the robot we should be afraid of – this is not like the AI cautionary thriller ‘AfrAId’ in 2024 where robots soon take over from human agency and have mendacious and malevolent agendas – but the humans who harness the power to equip and set in motion the AI in the first place. To this end, the robots are only as dangerous as the men who programme them in a film that offers an ultimately paper thin, rather than critical, dissection of misogyny and violence.