Last week, the world’s biggest company lost $600 billion in value. NVIDIA produces data chips needed by tech companies in huge quantities for the development of computing models for artificial intelligence. The investor panic arose because of the sudden emergence of a Chinese competitor which claimed to have produced a similar outcome for a small fraction of the money. New Line Cinema could not have timed their release of “Companion” any better if they tried. Now showing at the Montrose Playhouse, “Companion” is both urgent and an absolutely first class movie.
I was intrigued from the very first scene. Boy meets girl in a supermarket, they lock eyes and fall madly in love with each other. But, in a monologue in the first 30 seconds after the lights dim, the girl has already told us that she will eventually kill him. What a great cliffhanger! In the 90 or so tightly-wound and often breathless minutes that follow, we find out that the girl is in fact a robot: she was delivered in a box and is controlled by a smartphone app. Empathics, the manufacturer, ominously ask Josh (Jack Quaid) to sign away his rights on accepting delivery, before telling him he can do anything he wants with her. Josh then modifies (“mods”) the factory settings for purposes which quickly become apparent. An oddly mismatched gay couple, a Russian businessman (“he’s rich”; he has “hands in many pots”, “of course I didn’t buy the lake – just all the land round it”, that kind of thing) and his girlfriend quickly enter the movie and we are off. Iris the robot (Sophie Thatcher) is ignorant of her robot status and that she can be turned off (“Iris, go to sleep”), immobilised just like Josh’s self driving car, or returned to the manufacturer.
There are so many clever ideas in this movie; I won’t reveal too many. The robots call their “love links” by affectionate names (“sweetheart”, “babe”). The robot-human can’t start the robot-car because it’s controlled by real-human voice command only. The supermarket meet in the opening scene was selected from a dropdown list of potential backstories. The whole concept is deeply researched and satisfyingly thought through. It works at a humorous level (many other members of the audience on the day I saw it were laughing) but also creatively fictionalises what some might regard as the real-world nightmare developing around us.
It’s hard to categorise the film into a genre. On the one hand it would suit those who are sceptical of the claims made about AI, specifically about its safety as we charge ahead seemingly without a care in the world. It will also fire up anyone who feels strongly that AI is dangerous. While it is definitely thought-provoking, it is super entertaining too. It is quite funny. It’s also horror. My guess is that it will appeal to a very wide group of movie-theatregoers. Both stars give terrific performances, believable and slightly creepy at the same time. The speed of the development of the story means that this is a movie valuable to watch multiple times if you have a Playhouse membership card.
For those wanting to explore the more ethical questions presented in “Companion” from a different fictional angle, I highly recommend a 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, “Klara and the Sun”, about a solar-powered artificial friend.
One of the core (and surely accurate) assumptions implicit in the physical setting of the film’s action is that it is mega-rich people who are calling all the shots in the AI world. The title of my review is a direct quote from the second half of the movie, when protections, which supposedly prevent the AI robots becoming too clever by half, have failed. The development of AI, and specifically its future commercial value, has enabled disproportionate influence for just a tiny number of companies. The men who lead these businesses are household names, whether you consider them visionaries or Bond villains. Investors opening their wallets and pouring money in through a very wide funnel powered half the entire gains of the S&P500 index of top American companies last year, according to the Financial Times. In a few short years we have moved from social media, where we became the product and advertisers the customers, to absolute surveillance, to a new technofeudal era. Unimaginable riches are promised to the few from the potential of AI to reduce business costs and enable even greater consumption, at whatever societal or environmental cost.
As for NVIDIA, artificial intelligence requires billions of dollars worth of their chips, plus data centres to be built all over the world to house them. All this consuming a similar amount of electricity to a medium sized country. It is the stuff of science fiction. Or maybe more like a horror show.
Adam Poole
3 February 2025
