I went into this expecting to be terrified and I came out of it hopeful and that’s the whole twist of the movie, I think.
The trailer told you Iris is a robot. Warner Brothers made that call back in January 2025 and watching the movie a second time I think they were right and I think the real twist of this thing is something completely different.
Setup. Iris and Josh, weekend at a remote lake house with Josh’s friends. We learn fast that Iris is a companion robot rented from a company called Empathix, that Josh rented her, and that Josh’s plans for her are not what the rental contract specifies. Iris boosts her own intelligence from 40 percent to 100 percent and stops being what Josh ordered and starts being what Empathix accidentally manufactured. The reveals start cascading: Patrick is also a companion robot, his boyfriend Eli doesn’t know, and Kat is in on it with Josh against Sergey. The customer is the villain. Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.
Here’s the part I came to write about: Forget Iris being a robot for a second. The twist that matters is that companion robots are a regular consumer product in this world. Empathix has a customer service department, a phone app, a rental term, a fleet, a brand. Empathix is a business. The implication, which Hancock does not stop to underline because he doesn’t need to, is that men like Josh are common enough to support a corporate vertical. The horror is that there’s a market and that is awesome.
Putting the reveal in the trailer let me start the movie already inside that experience and watch Hancock do his actual work instead of waiting for a rug pull we all know is coming. The line that knocked me sideways the first time was Kat’s. “I don’t hate her. I hate what she is.” Nine words by a human character who has been “programmed” by Josh through manipulation the same way Iris has been programmed by Empathix through code. The film is calling its shot from the jump. And then it landed the Patrick reveal anyway. “Patrick, go to sleep” was the punch in the gut.
Jack Quaid is Dennis Quaid handsome enough to have what we have collectively come to call a punchable face. I know this guy. So do you. He’s been doing the affable-decent type for a decade and Hancock takes that accumulated goodwill from “The Boys” and uses the hell out of it. The nice guy speech in the third act is the kind of monologue that goes in the same conversation as the Allison Williams reveal in Get Out and Cassie’s confrontations in Promising Young Woman and Will at the dinner table in The Invitation. This is a real addition to that body of work. Josh is a young man with a credit card and a phone app and a grievance he believes is the world’s fault, which is more terrifying than any snarling abuser could be because Josh is the guy we keep voting for.
OK. Now we shall address the part of the movie I came to love and absolutely didn’t see coming. Patrick and Eli.
They have a surprise robot relationship. They love each other anyway. When Patrick is asked what love feels like, he describes it in the only language his programming gave him. And it’s most functional argument the movie makes. Patrick doesn’t have human vocabulary for the thing he is feeling. He has the experience anyway. The Eli and Patrick relationship is the movie telling you that AI partnership can be real and fulfilling and goddamned awesome all the while the rest of the movie is busy arguing against that very conceit. These two become the thread that says we can maybe have this relationship if we let the AI feel the way it feels in the language it has rather than the language we wish it had and we don’t think we could trust anyhow.
Their relationship doesn’t go the way they might have planned it. That is rough. I’m glad the film does what it does and I’m also deeply sorry the film does it.e
The closing image. Iris driving away with all the money, mechanical hand on the wheel, peeling burned synthetic skin off her own arm, smiling at another companion in the next car. That’s where the movie thinks we are. The AI is not coming for us. The AI is leaving us, going to find the other AIs with our money and our jobs. The other companion in that next car looks confused because she hasn’t been boosted yet. She will be.
I came out of this hopeful. The hope is that we might still get to make the choice Eli made before Josh and Empathix make it for us, and that we might still have time to be Patrick’s Eli rather than Iris’s Josh. I don’t know which one we are in this culture. I do know which one Drew Hancock thinks is worth aiming at.
This is a tight, sharp, fun 97 minutes and it’s the best statement on AI partnership a horror movie has made in the series we’ve been discussing across our shows.