By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid and Lukas Gage
Written and directed by Drew Hancock
New Line/Warner Bros.
I guess it’s a good thing that this is yet another review I feel the need to preface by saying that the less you know about the movie in question, the better, and that none of the important details will be disclosed below. The last couple of years have seen a gratifying number of horror movies just as devoted to surprising us as scaring us, including BARBARIAN, whose creators were among the producers of this one.
The writer and director, however, is feature first-timer Drew Hancock, who has written and produced for TV and–I can’t resist including this–played John Oates of Hall & Oates on the series YACHT ROCK. His COMPANION screenplay is just as twisty–and twisted–as BARBARIAN, but Hancock also brings an impish sense of humor to the entirety of the film while successfully playing it straight overall. From first scene to final credits (accompanied by an amusingly appropriate Bee Gees song), COMPANION keeps you gasping and jumping and shivering in anticipation, while also smiling at its many clever touches and the clockwork precision with which its ever-curveballing plot unfolds.
COMPANION is so good, and so engagingly unpredictable, that it can get away with having protagonist Iris (Sophie Thatcher) let us know about a major, unfortunate story development to come right in her opening narration. There’s plenty else thereafter to engage us pretty quickly so that reveal drops to the back of our minds, and that includes Thatcher’s turn in the lead. Already a genre regular at a young age (HERETIC, BOOGEYMAN, YELLOWJACKETS, a bit in MAXXXINE), she’s never had a role or given a performance as good as this before, one that keeps revealing new sides to her character. At first, though, she’s simply Iris, who has been very much in love with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) since their grocery-store meet-cute we witness in a flashback.
In the present day, Iris and Josh travel to a well-appointed lake house for a weekend vacation with a handful of friends: Eli (Harvey Guillén, as funny here as he is on WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS) and his model-handsome boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage), Josh’s ex-girlfriend Kat (Megan Suri) and her current beau, older Russian Sergey (Rupert Friend), whose mansion it is. Iris is a little anxious about making the trip to this remote location to hang with people she doesn’t know, but she goes for Josh’s sake, and this plus his occasionally condescending attitude toward her hints that this is not the perfect relationship it might seem on the surface.
There are a couple of hints at plot turns to come sprinkled through the dialogue in the early going, as when Sergey refers to Iris as “this beautiful creation.” But it’s only after Iris commits a very out-of-character and very bloody act of violence at about the half-hour mark that COMPANION springs its first big gotcha, and then we’re off to the races. Again, I’m going to assume that at least a few of the people reading this haven’t seen the second trailer (the nicely cryptic teaser is embedded below) and other marketing that spills some of the crucial details.
What can be said is that COMPANION manages to be a swiftly paced and sometimes shocking horror film, a delectably witty black comedy and a dissection of toxic relationships all at once, with the three sides perfectly complementing one another. Once the key bombshell is dropped, Hancock isn’t content with simply spinning off the ramifications from there; he keeps finding new ways to expand on this idea while weaving in his extremely dark social commentary. There are suspense sequences in COMPANION unlike any I’ve seen before, along with very elemental setpieces given fresh life in this new context. Hancock stages and shoots it all with a skill belying his debuting status, and that includes a handful of startling acts of graphic violence, among them one that will likely provoke plenty of cheering from audiences.
The entire ensemble is extremely well-cast and play their roles, some of which involve great shifts in attitude and allegiance, at just the right pitch. At the head of it all is Thatcher, who’s been good all along but really announces herself as a major talent with COMPANION. She’s stated in interviews that she’s a horror fan, and here’s hoping we’ll see a lot more of her in the genre in the future–especially if she can keep getting roles as good as this one.
