Drew Hancock spent a decade writing broad television comedy before making Companion (2025), a lean, well-acted thriller that treats a killer-robot story as a break-up. It is a good start, sharper in its ideas than in its second half, and Sophie Thatcher is the reason to see it.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in Companion (2025) is a woman finding out what she is. Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, a robot built to love one man and to want nothing for herself, and Drew Hancock's script gives her about forty minutes to work that out at a lake house full of people who already know. It is as sharp as anything the genre has managed lately, and it is the stretch that shows what Hancock is for.
He came to it late. Hancock spent the 2010s in television writers' rooms, on Blue Mountain State (2010), Suburgatory (2011), Supah Ninjas (2011) and Mr. Pickles (2014), with the film Fred 3: Camp Fred (2012) in between. Most of it was broad, youth-oriented comedy that few critics paid attention to. Suburgatory was the exception, and we liked its first season, though nothing in it announced the writer of Companion. He co-created My Dead Ex (2018), a romantic comedy series, and then wrote Companion as a spec script, because, by his own account, he had nothing on file that showed the kind of films he actually liked.
The apprenticeship shows in both directions. Hancock has said he wanted the film to be "more like 'Marriage Story' than 'Minority Report'", and the first half earns the comparison: the jokes land, the tone holds, and the robot is a person before she is a plot. Then the film becomes a chase, and the chase is the less interesting half. Bodies pile up, the argument about men who want women without wills is treated as already won, and the question we cared about, what Iris wants once she has stopped wanting Josh, never gets an answer. We sat forward for that first stretch and slumped a little when the knives came out, because we could see the better film Hancock had been writing and watched him put it down.
Two more jobs are lined up: a remake of The Faculty to write, and a feature called Seasons to direct. The remake sounds like the safer of the two. What Companion suggests is a writer who knows how to set a thing up and has not yet learned to trust the set-up over the pay-off. If Seasons stays put with its people for the whole running time, he may have something.
Biography
Drew Hancock is an American writer and director. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and began his career writing for television series including Blue Mountain State (2010), Suburgatory (2011) and Mr. Pickles (2014). He created the series My Dead Ex (2018).
Companion (2025) marked his feature directorial debut; he also wrote the science fiction thriller, which stars Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid.
