In Review: 'Companion,' 'No Other Land'

This week, a horror movie offers a killer robot as its most sympathetic character and an Oscar-nominated Israeli-Palestinian documentary finally becomes available.

Companion
Dir. Drew Hancock
97 min.

At first it’s not clear why Josh’s (Jack Quaid) friends don’t like his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher). Yes, she can seem a bit unsure of herself, but who wouldn’t be intimidated when asked to tag along for a weekend getaway at a luxurious lake house in the company of a bunch of people you barely know? Iris has a great smile and fun fashion sense and she clearly adores Josh. Yet Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri) can barely hide her contempt for the new arrival and her billionaire Russian boyfriend Sergey (Rubert Friend, laying it on thick) barely even acknowledges her existence at first. Josh’s pal Eli (Harvey Guillén) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage) are a little better, but there’s a whiff of condescension to the way they treat Iris, too. In bed with Josh after the first night, Iris is clearly unsettled, so Josh tells her to go to sleep. And she does.

Revealed early in the film, what’s going on with Iris might count as a big twist in a different film (and if you want to be completely unspoiled, come back to this review later). Here writer and director Drew Hancock (making an impressive feature debut after a lot of television work) treats it as a starting point. Though Iris doesn’t realize it, she’s a robot. Her memory of falling for Josh after a clumsy grocery store meet-cute comes from a dropdown menu option Josh clicked when setting up her programming. She loves him but she’s essentially a modern convenience born of AI advances, not unlike the self-driving car that brought them to Sergey’s mansion (but with much prettier hair). She’s also supposed to be harmless. So why, after Sergey attempts to sexually assault her, is she able to stab him to death? And what are Josh and his friends supposed to do with a killer robot in their midst?

That might sound like the set-up for an android-gone-amok thriller akin to M3GAN, but Companion has more on its mind. Freely drawing from inspirations like The Stepford Wives, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Blade Runner, and Ex Machina, the film is more interested in the questions raised by Iris’ existence than turning her into a killing machine. If she only loves Josh because she’s been programmed to love him, does that make the love any less real? Is the transactional nature of their relationship any less morally dubious than the sugar daddy arrangement between Sergey and Kat? As other twists reveal themselves, the dark joke at the center of the movie grows increasingly pointed: Iris might be a mechanical creation, but she’s the film’s most sympathetic character by far.

Thatcher’s deft performance picks up where the script leaves off. She keeps Iris tender and vulnerable even as the bodies start to pile up, never losing sight of the fact that Companion is ultimately a story of self-discovery, no matter how much mayhem it involves. Surrounded by black comedy, she’s the film’s beating heart, albeit one that pulses out ones and zeros instead of blood. —Keith Phipps

Companion boots up in theaters everywhere tonight.

No Other Land
Dir. Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor
95 min.

Basel Adra was born into oppression and occupation. As he shares in the establishing moments of No Other Land, an urgent and ever-more-relevant microcosm of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, his earliest memories are watching his father get arrested when he was five years old and joining a protest with his mother in a field two years later. Yet Adra was also born into an age where digital cameras and cell phones made self-documentation possible and he grew up with a young person’s tech-savvy means of getting information out into the world. One major theme of No Other Land is that instances of Palestinian suffering are either underplayed or invisible to the outside world, particularly in countries closely aligned with Israel. The fact that a documentary with this film’s pedigree—an acclaimed premiere at Berlin, a slot at The New York Film Festival, and now a Best Documentary nomination at the Oscars—has languished without a U.S. distributor speaks volumes. (It is playing theaters now without one.)

“I started filming when we started to end,” says Adra, and it’s clear from the film that the “end” is a protracted and excruciating fight. He and his family live in Masafer Yatta, a community of 20 small villages in the West Bank mountains that Israel has claimed as a military training ground. Much of No Other Land documents a campaign of forced evictions where Masafer Yatta residents watch their homes get bulldozed and scramble to create makeshift domiciles out of caves and jury-rigged electricity. The film is a product of his friendship with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who’s sympathetic to the Palestinian plight and who labors to break stories from the area. Abraham and Rachel Szor, another Jerusalem-based Israeli who does the camerawork, have joined Adra and activist Hamdan Ballal as a filmmaking collective to make No Other Land a patchwork of their observations. 

Adra and Abraham are a charismatic pair and their personal relationship is an important organizing force for a documentary that might otherwise feel like a fitful compilation of horrors. The son of activists—his father runs a gas station out of their home—Adra has a law degree but nowhere to practice, due mainly to the suffocating restrictions of the occupation. As he explains, cars with yellow license plates are free to travel throughout the country, but those with green plates cannot leave the West Bank without a permit, which accounts for why he never sees Abraham’s home. He shakes his head over Abraham’s “enthusiasm” for exposing the goings-on in Masafer Yatta and expecting immediate change when, in truth, they’re part of a long-term fight. 

The film bears out Abra’s plea for patience. No Other Land unfolds in chapters over several years, starting in 2019, and the action feels more cyclical than evolving, an intransigent battle between Palestinians clinging to their territory and Israeli authorities (and violent settlers) wresting it away. Yet specific moments stand out: The shootings of two different Palestinians right in front of the camera; a family sharing “a bag of bread” for dinner; Israeli settlers taunting Abraham for his advocacy (“Idiot, go home and write an article”) and threatening to post footage of him on Facebook. And that’s to say nothing of the bulldozers that ramble through intermittently to level homes. As the title suggests, No Other Land is a powerful plea for Masafer Yatta residents who have no place to go and no intention to leave. They believe they’ll win in the end. — Scott Tobias

No Other Land opens in select theaters this weekend.