Film of the week: Companion is an entertaining and thought-provoking thriller

Plus reviews of Hard Truths and Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

Companion stars Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid

Companion 

★★★★☆

At first glance, Companion (15A) seems to be an inventive and blackly comic thriller about what might happen if humanity allows technology to escape the firm grip of our guiding hand.

As Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) drive into the remote countryside for a weekend away at the lakeside cabin retreat of Josh’s Russian friend Sergey (an hilariously bedraggled Rupert Friend), the feel-good buzz of their quirky meet-cute at a farmer’s market gives way to an uneasy sense that Josh is more than a little controlling. Exactly how controlling becomes clear when Iris, desperately defending herself against Sergey’s unwanted advances, stabs their host to death — a feat that should be impossible, according to the shocked Josh, because Iris is ‘an emotional support robot’ who has been programmed to never cause harm to humans.

Having established the movie’s essential conflict as that of human and human-like (or artificial) intelligence, writer-director Drew Hancock then springboards us into a story chock-a-block with twists and turns that gradually corkscrews its way down through the cutting-edge sci-fi to get to one of the oldest conflicts of all.

Jack Quaid is strong here as the very embodiment of white male privilege, an apparently amiable and easy-going chap who is secretly — and literally — controlling Iris via the app on his phone (the intelligence level Josh has set for Iris tells us all we’ll ever need to know about who he truly is).

Sophie Thatcher, meanwhile, is terrific in the lead; given the very difficult role of fleshing out her mechanical character with nuance and subtlety, she responds brilliantly, and especially in the scenes where Iris is forced to confront the fact that her emotions are simply pre-programmed responses.

Drew Hancock has obviously watched his fair share of classic sci-fi — there are echoes of Blade Runner here, along with The Stepford Wives and Westworld — and he has repackaged the most telling elements of those in an entertaining and thought-provoking thriller.

theatrical release

Hard Truths 

★★★★☆

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (12A) stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Pansy, a London woman unable to leave her house and suffering from OCD, depression, and acute anxiety.

Her husband Curtley (David Webber) and adult son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) resent her aggressive micro-managing of their lives; the only person who reaches out to Pansy with any affection is her sister Chantelle (Michele Austin), but even the upbeat, laughter-loving Chantelle has her limits.

Pansy’s self-perpetuating doom-spiral is difficult to watch, mainly because Marianne Jean-Baptiste is superbly brittle even as her constantly simmering swirl of fear and rage erupts at regular intervals, and she gets terrific support from Michele Austin as the ostensibly level-headed Chantelle, although it’s clear that Chantelle has her own issues and that her well of sympathy is running dry.

The word covid appears nowhere in the script, but Mike Leigh is powerfully tapping into a silent epidemic of mental health issues that have yet to be publicly addressed.

theatrical release

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story

★★★★☆

Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story (12A) features plenty of footage of the young author in her pomp as her early novels — the Country Girls trilogy, banned here in Ireland — propelled her into a world of literary stardom and Hollywood glamour. It features some impressive talking heads too, including Anne Enright, Gabriel Byrne and her son Carlo Gébler.

The most compelling parts of Sinead O’Shea’s documentary, however, feature the older Edna as she looks back on her life in straight-to-camera interviews, which are intercut with examples of the many obstacles (most of them man-shaped) she was obliged to overcome.

Austere and still impossibly elegant, the grande dame of Irish letters took the Irish novel into places it didn’t know it needed to go. To the end she remained a woman who achieved much, regretted little, and played no small part in dragging Ireland kicking and screaming into the modern world.

theatrical release