Companion

 

Drew Hancock's imaginative "love story" Companion might just as easily have been titled "Iris" because Sophie Thatcher's captivating performance as the love slave of Jack Quaid's Jake is a role and a half, work that carries the substantial weight of the picture's wicked little heart and soul.

Thatcher, who played the defiant and deadly Mormon missionary in last year's Heretic, takes Hancock's deftly constructed character -- a kind of 21st century Stepford, if you will -- and lends her wonderful dimensionality, even as the layers of the movie's narrative onion are peeled away.

Iris and Jake arrive for a weekend at a remote "cottage" where friends Kat (Megan Suri), Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage) are partying with Kat's paramour Sergey (Rupert Friend). Everyone except Iris is clued in on a major secret around which the movie's central premise turns. It is that secret, which involves Iris, that leads to a tragic encounter between her and the mysterious Sergey and the mad scramble to not only save the weekend but the group's hides as well.

Hancock, a young director whose credits are mostly in television, has crafted a clever story that twists notions of identity into knots, and invites audiences who are inclined to think big thoughts to ponder what is it that makes us who we are, and is it, as the picture's soundtrack of '80s A.M. radio hits suggests, all about who loves us ... and how much.