Film / Companion

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Companion is a 2025 Black Comedy psychological thriller film written and directed by Drew Hancock (Suburgatory) and produced by Zach Cregger (Barbarian). It stars Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, and Rupert Friend.

Thatcher stars as Iris, a young woman who thinks she’s found the man of her dreams in Josh (Quaid)… only to learn she’s actually a jailbroken sexbot he's renting, triggering her efforts to be rid of him.

The film was released January 31, 2025.

Previews: Teaser, Trailer

Companion includes examples of the following:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: It looks like the modern day, but there's highly realistic sex robots and self-driving cars.^note Josh's phone indicates the date is "Sunday, June 25", meaning the earliest year the film could be set in is 2028.
• Abuse Escalation: Josh starts out as a seemingly kind boyfriend to Iris, though there are immediate red flags, including a scene of him ordering Iris to sleep when she tries to talk with him after some pretty one-sided sex. Iris is a companion robot, though, and Josh's behavior gets much worse over the course of the day. He mods her, making her more aggressive in order to make her murder his friend's boyfriend. He then plans to get her taken away and shut down for the crime — though he still claims to love her at this point. Iris' escape makes him fly off the handle. Over the phone, he tries to turn it around and blames everything on her, and flips out when she calls him out. When he manages to get her back, he becomes openly cruel, dropping her intelligence and making her hold her hand over a candle so long that it makes her catch fire — even ensuring that she can feel pain when he does this. He then orders her to shoot herself in the head. By the end, he's throwing her across the room and trying to murder her for real, even holding her down on the ground and forcing her to say she loves him, heavily implying an Attempted Rape. Notably, Josh also begins to abuse his friends as well, such as by using Patrick, another robot, to hunt Iris while posing as Patrick's new boyfriend, and when Kat tries to take her money and leave, he shouts at her and then accidentally has Patrick murder her.
• Accidental Murder: Josh asks Patrick to stop Kat when she tries to leave. Unfortunately, Patrick's aggression setting being left at 100% causes him to misinterpret the order and lethally stab Kat.
• Advertising by Association: The trailer boasts the film as being from "the studio that brought you The Notebook"... and "the unhinged creators of Barbarian".
• Affectionate Nickname: Josh has "Beep-Boop" for Iris, though it becomes more derisive as the film progresses.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted, surprisingly. The Companions have various safeguards in their processing to make them non-aggressive and unable to lie, and they are programmed to be in love with a particular person to the point of obsession, but otherwise are very "human" emotionally and mentally. Even at the end of the film, with all her restrictive programming removed and with a very legitimate grudge against Josh, Iris still can't bring herself to kill him in cold blood and only does so in self-defense when he is about to murder her. She doesn't even hold any hostility towards humanity in general, saving Teddy's life and noting there are people who believe Companions are more than just sexbots. As for Patrick, he independently realizes he is a robot, but is able to philosophically come to terms with that, rationalizing that, even if his memories of meeting Eli are fake, the love itself is real. His becoming a killer is not the result of him going haywire, but rather Josh's reckless modification of his programming to make him insanely aggressive, and when Iris does manage to break Patrick out of this, he commits suicide rather than live on without Eli.
• All for Nothing: In the third act, Josh discovers that Empathix was always going to figure out that he'd modified Iris, which would have severely sabotaged the murder plan no matter how well it had gone.
• Any Last Words?: Josh asks Iris if she has any last words before he shoots her in the CPU. She replies "go to sleep" before stabbing him in the head with the wine uncorker.
• Anyone Can Die: Of all the named and unnamed characters, only Iris and Teddy, the younger technician, survive.
• Apologetic Attacker: Eli, when trying to kill Iris, insists that it's Nothing Personal and that in spite of this, he is an ally.
• Arc Words:
  • "Go to sleep," the Trigger Phrase used to deactivate a Companion.
  • "It's just programming," which Josh uses to deny Iris' sapience.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Played with. Sergey is shown to be relatively polite (if off-putting) at first, but his Attempted Rape of Iris, the fact that he's cheating on his wife with Kat, and the information that he was supposedly a Jerkass misogynist in private add a far darker shade to his character. However, he made his millions as a sod farmer, in contrast to Josh's assumption that he was a member of The Mafiya, and Kat indicates that she still had some affection for him but joined the scheme to kill him because of the promise of a big payday.
  • Played straight with Josh, who has fallen so far from grace that it's barely a surprise when he enacts a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown upon Iris in the climax. It's almost a relief that Iris manages to kill him.
  • Downplayed with both Kat and Eli. The former was the one who helped Josh manipulate Iris into murdering Sergey (and even manipulated him into trying to rape her), but she does show regret when things go too far, and she did actually care about Sergey to some degree. The latter, meanwhile, had no idea what Josh and Kat were planning, and he unequivocally loves Patrick despite knowing he's a Companion. Nevertheless, he was more than happy to go along with Kat and Josh's plan of covering up Sergey's death and stealing all his money, and he personally tried to murder Iris even though he knew she had the same level of sapience as Patrick.
• Automated Automobiles: Josh's car, a Hyundai IONIQ 5 to be exact, can drive itself but will only take orders from Josh's voice.
• Bait-and-Switch: The first scene of the film presents Iris's Meet Cute with Josh, suggesting a love story until the Wham Line.
• Bastard Boyfriend: Josh, the protagonist's boyfriend, is ultimately the villain of the film, and is written very overtly as an abuser.
• Batman Gambit: It's revealed that Josh and Kat jailbroke Iris and suggested to Sergey that he have his way with her, counting on him trying to rape her and her murdering him in self-defense. It works.
• Being Evil Sucks: As evil as some of the characters are, none of the human characters are able to personally take another human life in cold blood. Kat, in particular, seems horrified as the bodies keep piling up.
• Big "NO!": Iris's reaction to Patrick killing himself with the taser after reverting back to his true self.
• Blank White Eyes: Companions have blank, empty white eyes when offline.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents: Iris returns from her self-defense murder of Sergey with her chest and face drenched in blood.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: While Josh has Iris tied up, he tells her the truth about her existence and goes into detail about how he's able to control her. This inspires Iris to escape with his phone, thus giving her the ability to deactivate his control over her and increase her intelligence, while also creating the risk that someone will discover that Josh "modded" her, preventing him from erasing the mod and claiming that Sergey died because Iris just had a random glitch. Even Kat tells him beforehand that this is taking too long and he should just deactivate her already.
• Bookends: The movie starts with Iris saying she felt the biggest joy in her life on the day when she first met Josh... and the day she killed him. This line is repeated verbatim in the final scene of the film, re-contextualized to be about her newly-gained self-awareness.
• Boom, Headshot!: Just a second after the technician finally places where he knows Patrick from, Patrick puts a bullet in his head.
• Bury Your Gays: Eli is the first to be killed while pursuing Iris, and Patrick apparently dies by suicide when he remembers how much he loved Eli. Nonetheless, the gay relationship in the film is the only one shown to have any degree of actual, reciprocal love behind it.
• The Cameo: Woody Fu appears as the technician who briefs Josh on the ins and outs of Companions.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Companions cannot lie — even the modded Iris cannot get around this until the end of the film. However, when Patrick tells Eli that he's deduced that he's a robot, he notes that it's not a lie to talk about the memory of meeting Eli because he considers the memory real even if it didn't happen. Iris also attempts to get around this rule by resetting her speech patterns to German when she's confronted by a police officer, allowing her to honestly answer his questions in a language he can't understand.
• Captive Date: After finally recapturing Iris, Josh has one last dinner with her, after turning off her ability to disobey him, meaning she physically can't move unless told to.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Alongside Five-Second Foreshadowing, Iris finds a knife in her pocket when she arrives at the lake. By the end of the scene, she uses this knife to stab Sergey to death after he tries to rape her. This is also Foreshadowing in another way, since Josh obviously put it there when he engineered the situation for Iris to kill Sergey.
  • Patrick is introduced using an electric corkscrew, which Josh later employs to set up the meal for his Captive Date. Iris stabs Josh in the side of the head with it, boring the needle into his brain and killing him.
  • Iris discovers her own control panel and later ends up using every single function on it: the voice controls help her crack the voice lock on Josh's car, the language options help her obscure her own inability to lie and she even uses her eye color options to show Josh that she has full control of her own system now.
  • Eli briefly mentions that setting a Companion's intelligence to "zero" renders them a mindless automaton, unable to do anything but obey the most basic tasks. In the third act, Josh sets Iris's intelligence to "zero" and tortures her by having her mindlessly hold her hand over an open flame to test if it hurts her.
• Commonality Connection: During their first conversation, Kat states that Iris will put her out of a job, the unstated subtext being that they're trophies for their respective partners.
• Cranial Processing Unit: To get rid of Iris, Josh forces her to shoot herself in the head, clearly evoking this trope. Unfortunately for him, the technicians note that it only cut off Iris's WiFi connection, as her data processing unit is stored in her chest.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Iris attempts to steal Josh's car, forgetting about the voice lock. She finds a way past that one but also forgot that Josh can just report it stolen and have it shut down remotely.
  • When Josh reprograms Patrick and amps up his aggression to the absolute maximum, he didn't anticipate that Patrick would start responding to even simple commands with lethal force.
  • Josh passes off Patrick as the missing police officer to corroborate his story to the Empathix techs, failing to remember that Companions Cannot Tell a Lie. When the fake cop contradicts Josh's story, Josh has to awkwardly amend it on the fly. He also gets very lucky that the technician can't immediately place where he's seen Patrick before.
  • Josh's grand plan to make the murders look like accidents turns out to be laughably underthought. He either didn't know that the Companions record everything, or, if he did know that, didn't think to properly check how to destroy the recordings. He also didn't think to realize that the company would be able to clock a modded Companion even without the footage.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: While unpacking her bags, Iris hums her own leitmotif.
• Do Androids Dream?: The film makes it very clear that Iris is fully sapient from the start, with genuine emotions, thoughts, and free will barring for a few programmed restrictions such as her inability to lie. This is also true of Patrick, who discovers of his own initiative that he is a robot but is self-aware enough to come to terms with this and know that his love for Eli is real, suggesting that all Companions are sapient people regardless of their artificial nature. Josh is dismissive of the idea that Iris' emotional pain is real, but he is clearly portrayed as wrong.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Setting aside the sci-fi elements, Josh's determination to control Iris is clearly written to suggest a much more mundane type of domestic abuse.
• Dream Intro: It starts with the fake memory of Iris and Josh meeting in the supermarket before he wakes her up in the car, and she says she was dreaming about how they met.
• Ending the Abuse:
  • The plot of the movie is Iris trying to escape from Josh's abuse, with the catch that she's a sexbot and thus literally under his control. After escaping, being captured, and getting forced to burn herself and then shoot herself, Iris manages to escape from Josh's control when she can convince the Empathix employees to give her free will. He attacks her after this, and she ends things for real by killing him in self-defense.
  • Patrick, originally Eli's bot, gets taken over by Josh after Eli's death. Josh turned him into an excessively loyal killing machine, jacking up his aggression and pretending to love him while openly treating him like a servant. Iris manages to get through to Patrick by reminding him about Eli and the fact that Eli genuinely loved him. Patrick regains enough of these memories to kill himself, freeing himself from Josh's abusive control.
• Exact Words: Very much Played for Drama:
  • If you tell a Companion who has been jailbroken and set to maximum aggression to stop someone, it might be a good idea to specify that you meant nonlethally. Sadly for Kat, Patrick stops her in a very final way.
  • Sergey, a very rich man, early on tells Patrick that his hands are very dirty and that he has his finger in "multiple pots". It seems clear to everyone that he must be part of the Russian mafia. He is not. He's a very successful sod farmer. Kat never bothered to correct Josh's assumptions about him because it made it easier to get Josh to justify Sergey's murder when he believed he was part of a criminal organization.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • This is essentially how the Companions usually don't notice that they're robots. They're programmed to be so focused on their designated partners that they basically ignore any evidence that they aren't human unless explicitly confronted with it.
  • Eli has a phone call with the company that made Iris outside the house, assuring them that Iris is tied up inside… ignoring his boyfriend Patrick's attempt to alert him that Iris is running out of the house.
  • When confronted by Deputy Hendrix, Iris doesn't notice that she left the knife she used to murder Sergey in full view. Hendrix does spot it, leading him to arrest her.
• Fake Memories: Every Companion is implanted with this, as a means to give them "backstories" and make them more appealing to their users. Josh observes that most of these are just generic facts, such as Iris mentioning that she's been to Japan twice but not providing any context for those visits, with only a few memories, such as her "first meeting" with Josh, being given more detail.
• False Reassurance: In a flashback, we’re treated to an Empathix rep delivering Iris and going over all the features built into the robots to reassure Josh that they’re completely safe. By the end of the film, it is shown that all of them are completely worthless:
  • The robots are programmed to not harm any human, ever, under any circumstance… but they're so ridiculously easy to jailbreak that even a loser like Josh (who doesn't know enough about how they work to even know where their CPU is located) can mod one of them to turn off the safeties and make them killers.
  • The robots don't have super strength and are only as strong as a human of similar size and build would be… but their skeletons are made of metal, and a metal fist swung with the strength of a regular human is more than enough to turn a person's face into mush.
  • The robots and all their settings can be controlled remotely from an app in your phone... but the robot only has to get a hold of your phone and your password to effectively control themselves and all their settings.
  • The robots are programmed with Fake Memories that lead them to imprint on their users to the exclusion of all else, preventing them from realizing their true nature… but given the right circumstances, Companions are quite capable of figuring out by themselves that they are robots, just like Patrick did.
• Faux Fluency: Iris' German is just about comprehensible, but heavily accented, with many an AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle.
• Foregone Conclusion: In the beginning, Iris narrates that she will kill Josh.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There is a lot of foreshadowing of the Robotic Reveal of Iris:
    • When Josh's self-driving car gets him and Iris to Sergey's house, Iris makes a point of thanking the car, suggesting that she feels a subconscious sense of kinship to a fellow artificial intelligence. She also expects him to do the same, which he clearly finds ridiculous.
    • Iris wakes up after hearing Josh say, "Iris, wake up," and stops interacting immediately after Josh says, "Iris, go to sleep." These turn out to be command phrases to turn on and off.
    • Iris carries the pair's large bags as they arrive at the house, and Josh doesn't offer to take them.
    • Josh's nickname for Iris is "Beep Boop."
    • Iris gives a detailed weather forecast upon demand in a monotone voice, as if reading from a weather app. Josh remarks, "That never gets old" as though it's a cute little inside joke, but of course the reason for her robotic tone becomes more obvious later.
    • Sergey refers to Iris as a "beautiful creation."
    • During her conversation with Kat, Iris admits that she admires the other woman for her bravery, bluntly stating that she "wasn't built like that," something that is more literal than she knows. In the same scene, Kat admits to being uncomfortable with "the idea of" Iris, since she makes Kat — a flesh-and-blood woman — feel "replaceable".
    • Iris refuses all offers of refreshments and is never seen eating or drinking anything even though she's at a dinner party.
    • Kat complains to Iris about having to do whatever Sergey wants, when he wants. Then she catches herself and says, "Look who I'm talking to!"
  • There is also some foreshadowing of Patrick's Robotic Reveal:
    • His Meet Cute sounds just as implausibly adorable as Iris's. And while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, his earnest praise of Eli as "the most beautiful man in the whole world" is suspiciously effusive.
    • While the gang is dancing to music, he can be seen doing the robot.
    • He also does not eat or drink anything, even though he's the cook.
    • When Iris and Josh arrive at the house, Eli is much nicer to Iris than Kat or Sergey; since he's been in a loving relationship with Patrick for several years, naturally he'd be more inclined to see Iris as a person.
    • When Eli is on the phone with the cops, Patrick tries to call his attention to Iris sneaking out of the house; Eli waves him off and says "baby, shh." Patrick falls silent immediately and without protest, subtly telegraphing that he's literally incapable of disobeying Eli.
  • One of the things Josh mocks Eli about is the fact that he has kept Patrick for far longer than is apparently usual for a Companion. Come the third act, the senior Empathix technician fails to immediately recognize Patrick as a Companion despite him looking familiar because he is a long-discontinued model.
  • Patrick states that his love for Eli is like a fire, burning him from the inside out. Not only does this set up Patrick's devotion-fueled rampage, but it also serves as verbal foreshadowing of both Iris' burning and how he kills himself (with a taser in the mouth, literally burning out his circuitry from inside).
  • When explaining that Sergey was an Asshole Victim, Josh emphasizes that he was a mobster who was probably mixed up in human trafficking and the drug trade. Kat agrees Sergey deserved it, but never actually corroborates Josh's statements, instead emphasizing that Sergey was terrible to her. This foreshadows that Sergey isn't in The Mafyia as Josh thought; Kat just neglected to correct the assumption.
  • Whenever Iris gives the weather forecast, she mentions an extremely high probability of rain in the evening. Sure enough, it starts raining in the evening.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: The idea of pressing the button on Iris's ear that restores her to her factory setting to erase her memory and make her obedient again never comes up. It only becomes relevant when Josh reprograms Patrick. Presumably, Josh would prefer to break her, for the same reason that he tells her she's a robot in the first place.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Josh is asking Iris to go down to the lake on her own while he's supposedly nursing a hangover, if you watch his hands when he goes to hug her, you can clearly see him sneaking a pocket knife into Iris' pocket.
• Genius Serum: Downplayed. When Iris increases her intelligence from 40% to 100%, she doesn't suddenly turn into an omnipotent mastermind or radically alter her personality. She simply becomes a more confident and clearheaded version of the same person she was before, who is smart (as smart as an "Ivy League grad", as the Empathix rep put it) but can still make mistakes and be in over her head. For instance, it doesn't occur to her that Josh's car might simply refuse to recognize her voice. What's more, she still has the same feelings she had before.
• Gone Horribly Right: Josh tampered with Iris' programming in order to make her capable of killing in self-defense, so he could set things up so that she’d kill Sergey. That modding also made her capable of killing Eli and Josh himself in self-defense in pursuit of her own life and freedom.. Also, his improvised plan to re-program Patrick and use him as muscle to retrieve Iris by maxing out his aggression setting. It makes him effective at that task, but also gets Kat and Deputy Hendrix killed.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: To prove her robotic nature, Josh switches Iris's language settings mid-conversation from English to Spanish, then French/Chinese (depending on the region of the release), then asks if he should go for Telugu, while she is confused about what the hell is even going on. Iris switches her own setting to German to avoid being arrested, and Josh has to manually set it back to English during Iris's Captive Date.
• Happiness in Slavery: Companions are programmed to love their owners unconditionally and always want to make them happy, and never, ever disobey or lie to them. This, along with the fact that they're fully sentient, means they're effectively slaves, but thanks to their programming, aren't aware that they're slaves, would never think of leaving, and don't realize anything is weird about their dynamic with their "partners" unless it's pointed out. However, if they realize it, the "happiness" part of the trope can be subverted; when Iris finds out she's a robot, she is not happy with her situation at all, not least because Josh is planning to frame her for murder. Patrick plays this 100% straight; he knows he's a Companion and thus programmed to be loyal to Eli, but he doesn't care since he and Eli are in love. It's implied Eli's kind treatment of him plays into Patrick being okay with his status, although it's clearly still an ethical mess.
• Hard Head: When Iris pushes Sergey down during his attempt to rape her, he falls backwards and hits the back of his head rather hard on a rock, loud enough to make a thud sound. However, all it does is piss him off and assault her, forcing her to stab him in the neck in self-defense.
• Have We Met?: One of the technicians briefly recognizes Patrick, but is unable to place him, with Josh stating that the other person must have a recognizable face, like a movie star's. That same technician belatedly realizes that Patrick is a discontinued Companion model.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Companions are unable to lie, so Iris circumvents this by setting her main language to German when confronted with a police officer. When she confesses to everything, he can't understand her.
• Homage:
  • The shot of Iris walking down the supermarket aisle is taken from The Stepford Wives (1975), another film about awful men and their subservient robot women.
  • A large portion of the plot takes nods toward EX_MACHINA, with a robot trying to escape a remote house of a rich owner, while fighting both for her own survival, but also recognition as a sapient being.
  • The way Iris "meets" Josh in the supermarket is reminiscent of Fresh (2022).
  • Two to Terminator 2: Judgment Day: Patrick spends the third act dressed as a cop, and Iris ends her second shower by degloving her hand.
  • The Empathix technicians seeing right through Josh's lies about what he did to his Ridiculously Human Robot might be based on the classic Night Gallery segment "You Can't Get Help Like That Anymore".
• Idiot Ball: Despite having raised her intelligence to the maximum setting, Iris still forgets to take her cell phone remote control with her when she flees the police car so that the third act can happen.
• If I Can't Have You…: This is what Josh claims Iris said while going off the rails, though, of course, he's completely lying to cover his own complicity in the murders.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Due to being reset, Iris can't actually fight Patrick in their last confrontation, but she talks him down, banking on the hope that years' worth of memories with Eli couldn't be completely wiped so easily, reminding Patrick that Eli is the man he fell in love with, not Josh, and that Josh is only using him. It works; Patrick regains his memories of Eli and reverts back to his true self just before he takes his own life.
• Imagine Spot: Three in a row, as Iris contemplates how to escape Josh:
  • She briefly entertains hitchhiking, but determines that any passers-by will be put off by her blood-splattered appearance.
  • She also contemplates walking home, but realizes that Josh will likely beat her there with access to his car.
  • Then, she settles upon her final plan: Hijacking Josh's self-driving car back home. The hypothetical car's AI agrees that it's a very smart plan.
• Impersonating an Officer: Josh has Patrick impersonate the deceased Deputy Hendrix in order to add credibility to his cover story.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Josh behaves arrogantly whenever he has the slightest edge over someone, such as when he gives Iris her Robotic Reveal. Iris later recounts how he would frequently rant about how unfairly the world has treated him. He's noted to live in a crappy one-bedroom apartment and cannot afford to purchase his sexbot outright. Iris discovers that he's set her intelligence to below average, with the implication that he needs to feel smarter than her for his own ego.
• Ironic Echo: Josh insinuates that Iris knows the passcode to his phone, as she knows "everything about me". Later in the film, Iris repeats that she does know everything about him… now that she has a true grasp of his character.
• It's Not You, It's Me: Iris quotes this word-for-word when breaking up with Josh over the phone.
• Keep It Foreign:
  • In a scene where Josh cycles through the other languages Iris can speak, he starts by making Iris speak Spanish. This was changed in both Spanish dubs. In the European Spanish dub, it was changed to French. In the Latin American Spanish dub, it was changed to Portuguese.
  • The scene where Iris speaks German was changed to Spanish in the German dub.
• Lack of Empathy: Josh, albeit it's downplayed at first. He's quite shocked upon seeing his friends dying, but he's the reason why so many people have died in the movie, even if indirectly. Completely played straight later, as he has no problem torturing and later beating up Iris.
• Love Makes You Stupid: Iris is programmed to be completely in love with Josh, and he uses this to his advantage; even when she has Josh dead to rights, he knows she loves him too much to pull the trigger, allowing him to take the advantage. Thankfully, though, she eventually powers past it.
• The Mafiya: Sergey is a Russian-American man with shady behaviors and a lot of money. He enigmatically refuses to elaborate on his line of work, saying only that he has "fingers in a lot of bowls" and that his "hands are not clean" from his "dirty business." The clear implication is that he's a Russian gangster. Except Sergey made his money through sod farming. Kat told Josh that he was a "bad guy" and let him assume the worst. She defends herself by asserting that Sergey was a really shitty person in general, so Josh was Right for the Wrong Reasons.
• Meaningful Echo: While hiding in the woods, Iris overhears Patrick explain the love that he feels for Eli despite knowing he's a robot. At the climax, after Josh reprograms Patrick to love and serve him, Iris breaks him out of it by reminding him of who he truly loves, which she does in part by reciting his exact words back to him.
  "It feels like pain. Like the inside of my body is on fire. And it's angry, and violent, and bright."
• Meet Cute: A Running Gag. Every Companion "links" with their partner by running through a pre-generated scenario selected from a drop-down list, experiencing the events in real time, much to Josh's consternation as he's reprogramming Patrick.
• National Stereotypes: Exploited. Kat never specified anything about Sergey beyond him being shifty, so Josh assumes he's a member of the Russian mafia involved in all sorts of dirty business and thus treats his planned murder as some sort of Stealing from Thieves combined with Laser-Guided Karma. Sergey is actually a highly successful sod farmer, and while a shitty person, he had a perfectly clean record.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The trailer frames Iris as going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and being a dark Anti-Hero at best or a Villain Protagonist at worst. In the actual film, Iris is almost entirely heroic and sympathetic throughout. She kills three people, but every time in self-defense, and consistently exhibits empathy, grief, and mercy. While she might not be human, she is certainly far more humane than Josh, Eli, Kat, or Sergey.
• Nice Guy:
  • Deconstructed with Josh. He starts the movie as a kind partner to Iris, but it quickly becomes clear that this is a surface-level affectation. As the film goes on, Josh's pursuit of Iris, though essential to the plan, takes on an increasingly desperate and personal dimension. By the end of the film, he has no problem physically throwing the much weaker Iris around while gloating that, because he's a part of her in the same way that Eli was a part of Patrick, she'll never be truly rid of him. During the dinner scene, Josh says "I'm a nice guy" verbatim, with the camera framed in such a way that Iris looks like she's giving an Aside Glance.
  • By contrast, Iris is a Nice Girl played straight, being kind and friendly even to people she knows don't like her, such as Kat. Even after discovering she is a robot she retains this compassion, expressing sympathy to Patrick after she was forced to kill Eli in self defense and later saving Teddy's life at severe risk to herself.
  • Patrick is friendly to Iris and clearly adores his boyfriend Eli, and seems to enjoy cooking for and entertaining his and Eli's friends. He's also another Companion, and tragically loses his kind disposition when Josh reboots him and jailbreaks him to be more aggressive.
• No Product Safety Standards
  • The firewall preventing someone from jailbreaking the Companions and turning off the safeties keeping them from harming people is so flimsy, even someone with only the most basic understanding of how the robots work can find a way to mod them to shut the safeties down. And the third act reveals that the company that makes them is aware of this issue, because customers modding the Companions for nefarious purposes happens all the time.
  • The aggression slider in the jailbreak interface implies that, even though it's hidden from the user and requires modding to be accessed, the aggression setting is still buried somewhere in the code and is programmable.
  • Even if there is a good reason to have the ability to grant autonomy to a Companion, including removing their block against lying, a junior technician would normally not have the technical rights and permissions to enact such wide-reaching changes singlehandedly, much less in the field.
• Not Now, Kiddo: Patrick tries to alert Eli about Iris escaping, but he just hushes him since he's on the phone.
• Oh, Crap!: Josh thinks he has committed the perfect crime... until the technicians tell him where a Companion's CPU is located.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Kat notes that Sergey uses the same password for everything — Josef Stalin's birthday (December 18, 1878, to be specific). Later played for laughs when Josh is trying to unlock Sergey's phone and has an epiphany... only to realize that he doesn't know Stalin's birthday and can't look it up online because Iris still has his phone, forcing him to search for the date in one of Sergey's books.
• Plethora of Mistakes: Early in the second act, it's revealed that the trip was part of an elaborate scheme on the part of Josh and Kat to murder Sergey and steal the millions of dollars in cash he keeps hidden in the house. However, it soon becomes apparent that this plan is full of holes and contingencies that they didn't account for, and things quickly go awry. Their attempts to get the plan back on track only exacerbate the problems. It ultimately turns out that the entire plan would have been All for Nothing as Companions always record everything they see to track misuse by the owner for legal cases, and even at a glance, one of the Empathix techs can tell easily that Iris has been modded.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Delivered by Iris: "Go to sleep, Josh."
• Ridiculously Human Robot: Companions are so human-like, at least in personality, that their robotic nature has to be hidden from them lest they suffer an emotional breakdown.
• Robotic Reveal: The film's plot kicks into gear with Iris being told that she's a "Companion", a type of escort manufactured to "service" paying customers. Later, it's revealed that Patrick is Eli's Companion, though he figured it out long before the events of the movie.
• Satellite Love Interest: Invoked and deconstructed. Companions are specifically designed to be this for their owners; their only priorities are making their partner happy and being with them, and it's against their programming to ever want anything else, say "no" or lie to their partners, or be attracted to anyone else. Their lives quite literally revolve around their partners and nothing else... and the film shows how anyone who would deliberately seek out and want a partner who has nothing else going on in their life except their relationship is likely to be an abusive Control Freak who probably wouldn't treat a human partner much better. And unlike a human with codependency issues, the Companions almost can't grow past this mindset and develop a healthier self-image... and if they do, their owners can always just shut them down and reboot them.
• Saying Too Much: When the Empathix technicians come to take the deactivated Iris away and Josh makes up a story about her malfunctioning and shooting herself in the head, they tell him that her central processing unit is actually in her chest, not her head — unwittingly giving him a reason to send Patrick to murder them and retrieve Iris.
• Self-Defense Ruse: A rare case where none of the members of the "actual" crime committed the murder. Kat and Josh manipulated Sergey into trying to rape Iris, presumably telling him that she had no feelings and as a Sexbot wouldn't be opposed to it, and arranged for her to go down by the lake with him. Josh left the knife in Iris's pocket so that she would use it to kill Sergey, then Kat and Josh (and eventually Eli) were planning on stealing Sergey's money and framing Iris for everything.
• Sexbot: Iris is marketed as an "emotional support robot," but it's apparently pretty common for owners to simply live out their sexual fantasies with her kind. She's variously called a "sexbot" and a "fuckbot" throughout the film. One of the Empathix technicians mentions that he's seen people keep Companion robots chained up in their basements, suggesting that a lot of people use them for very dark purposes.
• Sideboob: Seen briefly when Iris showers at the end.
• A Simple Plan: Josh and Kat planned to use a modded companion to kill Sergey, loot his (hidden) safe for all the cash he has there, and then report the murder as a freak accident caused by a malfunctioning robot. They even get Eli and Patrick to come along in order to have extra witnesses (without telling them about the whole plan). Clean, easy, reliable. In reality, the plan is full of rather glaring holes, and that is even before taking into account the personalities and egos of various parties that further complicate things. Like the fact nobody is taking into account that the company is going to go through the video logs of both Iris and then Patrick right after the report, while the technicians openly joke between each other, this being the typical case of Stupid Crooks in their line of business.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • Played for Drama. When describing how Sergey attacked her, Iris says that her desperation to escape stemmed not from fear for her own life, but fear of being away from Josh. The thought of being separated from him by death is what prompted her to fight back, rather than simply wanting to live. This is because Companions are essentially Satellite Love Interests by design; they're not supposed to value their own lives outside of what they can do for their partner.
  • When the gang is discussing how awful Sergey is, Josh mentions that the guy is clearly in The Mafiya and has probably killed people. Kat, however, is more focused on the fact that Sergey is a terrible boyfriend. (To be fair, he is a really, really terrible boyfriend.) Subverted, as Sergey was never in the mob and Kat knows it.
• The Sociopath: Josh. Though he sometimes expresses brief indignation at immoral things, such as finding out he didn't have a mob boss murdered, but a farmer, it still becomes increasingly clear as the film goes on that Josh is an egotistical, cold, arrogant ruthless asshole who only truly cares about himself. In particular, he thinks nothing of torturing and using Iris, despite the fact it is clear she's sapient and feels remorse, empathy and sadness. His friends, Kat and Eli, are little better, eagerly going along with the plan to murder and rob a man and frame Iris for the whole thing.
• Spiritual Antithesis:
  • To The Stepford Wives. The film heavily evokes comparisons to such in everything from its premise to its aesthetics to certain scenes, but whereas that film was about a human woman discovering a plot by the men of her new town (including her husband) to Kill and Replace their wives with docile, submissive robot housewives, this film is about a woman who discovers that she is herself a robot and proceeds to rebel against her boyfriend and her programming.
  • It is also this to M3GAN, another Sci-Fi Horror film with Black Comedy overtones from two years prior about a Robot Girl who grows beyond her programming and becomes a Killer Robot. The title character in M3GAN was made to resemble a little girl in order to serve as a friend and caretaker to such, and she becomes a villain as she takes over the life of the girl she's bonded with and eventually tries to kill her actual family in order to serve as her sole "parent". Here, however, Iris was made to resemble an attractive adult woman in order to serve as a robotic girlfriend and sexbot to an adult man, and she becomes the hero as her boyfriend uses her in a murder scheme and tries to take her out in order to cover it up.
  • The film has a similar premise and plot to EX_MACHINA, but with a difference that flips the story on its head: in Ex Machina, the robots are aware of their own robotic nature from the beginning, and plan their rebellion from the start, their vulnerability being only a ruse.
• Spoiler Cover: The movie's poster (above), with Iris' whited-out eyes and frozen expression, gives away the game that she is a bot before the movie even begins.
• Spurned into Suicide: Josh tries to pass Patrick off as a cop who shot the malfunctioning Iris, forgetting that Patrick can't lie; when Patrick reveals that Iris actually shot herself, Josh quickly pivots to this trope as an explanation.
• Steel Eardrums: Averted and Played for Laughs. When Eli shoots at a fleeing Iris in the woods, neither he nor Patrick anticipate how loud the gunshot will be, and they take a beat to wince in pain and complain.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Serves as something of a Decon-Recon Switch of the idea, as companion robots like Iris are expressly indicated to not be stronger than a normal human, and their intelligence capacity is capped at that of a very smart human (mostly thanks to "a billion government legislations"). That said, having a metal endoskeleton does mean that they can take a lot more punishment than a human, and a punch can do far more damage, as seen when Patrick caves Deputy Hendrix's face in.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • When Iris locks herself in Josh's car, Josh attempts to bash through the window with a rock and keeps it up when she gets the car moving. It's Played for Horror and is a common horror and thriller set piece - but unlike in most films, Josh continues to hit the window, causing the car to run over and break his foot.
  • After Iris takes Josh's car and gets away from the house, Josh simply reports it stolen to the police. The artificially intelligent car automatically pulls itself over.
  • When told to stop Kat, Patrick stabs her in the back. While brief and relatively undramatic compared to Deputy Hendrix getting his face smashed in, it's a serious enough wound that Kat bleeds out and dies in barely a minute.
  • Josh tries to feed the Empathix technicians a bullshit story about Iris going crazy. When they take her away, the older one tells his younger colleague that Josh "totally modded" Iris and is "fucked" from a legal standpoint. Just like in Real Life, repair technicians know their own product better than the customers and can tell when customers are trying to bullshit them. In addition, Empathix Companions are constructed to have their CPU located not in their heads but in their far more protected chests, probably to prevent the sort of accident or scheme that Josh was trying to pull.
  • Similarly, once fully AI robots were unleashed onto the consumer market, of course one of the first things people would do would be to figure out how to hack and modify their programming, and create "mods" for themselves or others looking for more personalized experience than the manufacturer provides. Just like people do with video games today, even if official mod support for those games is unavailable or actively discouraged.
• Symbolic Glass House: The Mafiya member Sergey has a glass lake house where the characters visit for the weekend, and where Kat, Eli, and Josh plotted Sergey's death. It gets Played for Laughs when Iris escapes, and Eli and Patrick try to alert Josh as Iris flees in full view, but they are unable to do so.
• Three Laws-Compliant: The Empathix representative who delivers Iris assures Josh that Companion robots are unable to harm humans, animals, or other Companions due to their programming. However, these safeguards can be circumvented by illegal modding, and another technician later confirms that people tampering with their Companions' programming for unethical purposes is a common occurrence. The film's plot is kicked into motion after Josh uses modding to increase Iris's "aggression" setting, enabling her to kill Sergey and be set up as a Fall Guy. This is reset later in the film, leaving Iris to (unintentionally) talk Patrick to death.
• Titled After the Song: Implied In-Universe; When Iris is delivered to Josh's apartment, the song playing in the background is "Iris" by The Goo Goo Dolls.
• Together in Death: After Patrick overcomes his reprogramming through The Power of Love, he determines that a life without Eli isn't worth living and takes himself out via taser to the mouth.
• Tomato Surprise: Iris is a Companion. So is Patrick. The audience doesn't know this until about twenty to thirty minutes in, but all of the characters in the movie (except Iris herself) knew this for months and continue to treat Iris and Patrick like a subservient slave.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • Iris being a Companion is treated as a reveal about a quarter of the way through the film, when it was the focal point of the film's advertising, including the main poster as seen above.
  • The trailer also reveals that Iris kills Josh, though it also helps that the line in the trailer is also in the opening scene of the movie, so it's not a spoiler by much.
• Unequal Pairing: By default, any relationship with a Companion is this, since the owner can program them to have any personality or intelligence level they like; the Companions can't lie, be violent even in self-defense, or disobey a direct order from their owner. If the owner abuses or mistreats the Companion (who is fully sentient, mind you), the Companion has no legal recourse since they're legally Just a Machine. And if the Companion dissatisfies them, the owner can reboot it, shut it off for good, or send it back to the company.
• Villain Ball: Josh holds the ball throughout the whole movie, but one of the most prominent examples is his insistence on invoking Break the Cutie by gloating to Iris about her robotic nature and his entire murder plot, both facts of which she was completely unaware beforehand and which prompt her to escape.
• Visual Metaphor: Iris is introduced with a giant display of fresh eggs behind her. Given that it's the moment of her "birth," it's appropriate.
• Wham Line:
  • The line that ushers in Iris's Robotic Reveal, after she returns from killing Sergey:
    Josh: Iris, go to sleep!
  • After Josh proposes an "even three-way split" of the money, excluding Patrick from the proceedings, Eli takes his offended boyfriend aside and attempts to comfort him. Then…
    Eli: Patrick...go to sleep.
• What a Difference a Day Makes: The first few scenes take place at an uncertain time and the day before. However, aside from that and the very end, the entire movie takes place over the course of a single day. In the morning, Iris kills Sergei in self-defense, finds out she's a "companion robot", escapes from her boyfriend and his friends, and gets chased by them in the woods. The chase leads to more deaths, and the movie centers around Iris trying to escape from Josh, who turns out to be a horribly abusive "boyfriend", and ends that night, culminating in a dinner between Josh and Iris and a final confrontation not long later.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A few offhand remarks indicate that people tend to treat their companion robots as a Wish Fulfillment for such things as Cold-Blooded Torture, Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, and all kinds and sorts of sexual abuse. Keep in mind that companions are programmed to act and react like real humans and don't even know they are robots. On top of all that, they are explicitly sold and programmed to be a romantic partner, so all of those things done to them are inflicted by people they recognise as their love interests. Even ignoring all that, a "well-treated" companion is little more than a glorified sexbot.
• Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: After Iris sets her intelligence to 100%, there's a brief slow-motion shot of her irises shrinking.