Following advice from a friend I read nothing in advance of this viewing. Not absolute zero, but cold.
For the first half hour or so I was thinking 'OK, Black Mirror-lite' and maybe also taking in Sophie Thatcher as Anya Taylor-Joy-lite in this role too. But then I remembered how good she was in Heretic and as her performance here starts to escalate, I began to shed that sense that I was getting something less than I needed from Companion.
It might be a bit less self-consciously clever than a lot of its contemporary equivalents, but it's fun, and humour is generally underrated in Sci-Fi. This film is not really about our most pressing technology anxieties, rather it gives us a scenario grounded in humans being greedy and dumb in familiar ways with a patina of gender politics.
If I have a quibble it's that the situation requires the tech to be both near adjacent to our own and yet simultaneously far more advanced, and that in this context the humans do all seem just a bit blasé about machine sentience.
But as I said, the whole thing is a bit of an extended, entertaining and partially disguised gag, and so that apparent disconnect from projected reality doesn't matter too much.
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