I Just Saw

I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day.

It’s tough to synopsise Companion, which comes on the heels of Barbarian (2022). (It shares with that film producers, and themes of misogyny and male violence.) I went in relatively cold and my experience felt unique as a result, different than if I’d been even dimly aware of where it was going.

What I can say is that it represents a fairly pitch-perfect screenplay that mixes genres to engaging effect. Though marketed as horror, it’s not really fearful or Gothic as such and is better understood as a blackly comic thriller. It even has some of the charms of old crime films in that style, from The Ladykillers (1955) to Fargo (1996), wherein silly people try to pull off serious crimes and carnage ensues. All I’ll say about the plot is that Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid play a handsome young couple who arrive at a cabin in the woods (there’s your first red flag) to spend the weekend with two other couples before secrets about certain people are revealed and a criminal scheme kicks into gear.

This is one of those tales where everything that ultimately happens is given in the first line of dialogue, but you’re held by the suspense of how things could possibly get from A to B as described. The plotting is consistently surprising, stronger than you necessarily get in satirical films of this type, which sometimes neglect the pulpier thrills for heavy-handed sermonising. Companion is a satirical text, though it wears its meanings gracefully, getting laughs from the characters’ greed, selfishness, and stupidity while tossing out twists and turns.

It ends up becoming a biting satire of incels (or “involuntary celibates”) and their pathologies. One man is summed up as enjoying bar trivia, video games, and complaining about what the world owes him. Ouch. It deftly and somewhat subtly makes fun of men who see themselves as “nice” and consider themselves “good guys” when really they’re just weak, and if given a safe opportunity would rape and pillage as much as their forefathers did. The type of man you see on Reddit bragging about how they put a blanket on a drunk woman WITHOUT molesting her, thereby proving the opposite of what they were trying to convey: that they thought about it.

The climax of Companion goes on a touch too long and requires flattening out its antagonist into more of a Hollywood monster, to be defeated with generic action. Its last touch is pleasingly gruesome, though, and what came before is so strong that it doesn’t leave too much of a bad taste in the mouth. Though it isn’t exactly horror, Companion looks set to be one of the stronger entries marketed as such in 2025.

Rating: 3/4