Companion

Does it strike anybody else as notable that Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, both top-billed 80s stars, have a son who may have followed his parents into showbiz but has specifically carved out a niche for himself as the premier choice when filmmakers are casting unkind or outright manipulative boyfriends? Quaid junior then unexpectedly happy to build his career out of being the disappointing, unreliable component in onscreen relationships rather than, say, the intensely masculine, experimental aviators essayed by his father or the energetic stability characteristic of his mother's girls next door. Regardless of this pleasant counter-programming, Jack Quaid is on fine, dipshitting form in writer-director Drew Hancock's Companion, a film that has been done no favours whatsoever by an ad campaign that couldn't wait to tell you way too much about the true nature of Sophie Thatcher's worryingly malleable Iris. 

Dressed in sixties pastels and grinning nervously, Iris is an intruder from a completely different universe, one that has been erected upon meet-cute scaffolding rather than the commodified human interaction experienced by the other, money-grubbing thirtysomethings cozying up to Rupert Friend's shady (and, they presume, rip-off-able) Russian businessman. Compared to everybody else in Companion's simmering pan, she's an innocent. A person who, by design, is unable to offer up much beyond passive, plastic obedience. Her one tell that she might possess an unexplored knack for defiance is her voice: she speaks with the same lilting murmur as Juliette Lewis, an actress who spent the 1990s playing a variety of difficult, even homicidal women. Unexpectedly timely, given that the entire data apparatus of the richest country on the planet has recently been given over to similarly vindictive young white men, Companion is a ninety minute worry about what it is to be trapped at somebody's else's beck and call; to experience only fleeting hints of real agency before your emotions and aspirations are packed away, lest they upset the people controlling your sliders.