Companion

Drew Hancock’s first feature spends its secret early: Iris is identified as a companion robot near the beginning rather than at the end. Hancock has explained that this was partly a marketing decision, since without the reveal the material available for a trailer would have looked like an ordinary relationship film. He wrote it as a spec script; Zach Cregger was attached to direct for a while, then stepped back to produce and handed the chair to the writer. The mechanism of the whole picture is a slider in an app: Josh raises Iris’s intelligence from 40 percent to 100, and later drops it to zero, and both the jokes and the threat come out of that control. Hrishikesh Hirway recorded a twelve piece string ensemble at East West Studios and had Sophie Thatcher sing Iris’s theme herself, leaving a thin layer of his own pitch shifted voice underneath it. Thatcher won best actress at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards for the role. The film opened to 9.3 million dollars and finished on 37 million worldwide, against a budget of 10 million. A good fit if you want to know what Iris is early and then watch her change setting by setting. Not for anyone waiting for the robot to be revealed in the final scene.