Companion (2025) Ending Explained – Does Iris learn the truth?

Companion Plot Summary

The story centers on a seemingly perfect couple, Iris (played by Sophie Thatcher) and her boyfriend Josh (played by Jack Quaid). After meeting at a supermarket and instantly falling in love with one another, they’ve spent the better part of a year together. Things are going great but now they have their biggest test yet – meeting Josh’s friends.

Heading up to a remote cabin in the wilderness (because of course ,this is such an original setting in a thriller!) the weekend gets off to an awkwardly frosty start, as we meet a Russian guy called Sergey, his disgruntled partner Kat, and bubbly lovers Eli and Patrick. With the first half of the movie told from Iris’ perspective, a twist throws everything up in the air, allowing for multiple perspectives to filter in after. This is very much one of those movies where you really need to go in blind before reaching the “twist” to get the most out of this.

When something major is revealed, the story changes slightly, unveiling a deeper thread of motivation running through our characters, as Iris finds her whole world come crashing down around her. What ensues from here is a classic hunter VS the hunted plot, mixed in with revenge, deception and vengeance, leading to a climactic final conflict inside the house.

What is Iris?

In the first of the movie’s several twists, we learn that Iris is a companion robot, designed to be an “emotional support bot that fucks” as Josh so crudely describes. These bots (including Iris) have an “outline of memories” which help to give an outline and a backstory. Josh and Iris’ first meet was picked from a list of other meet-cutes. They never met at the supermarket, not really. In reality, Josh just had a delivery brought over to his place.

When the bot is delivered, Josh is told he needs to establish a “love-link” with Iris. All of this is voice-activated and there’s even a slider to change Iris’ intelligence. However, it’s limited over how much. She can’t do harm to humans or animals either, and also cant lie. Furthermore, ‘Factory Reset’ is established by holding your thumb up to the back of the bot’s ear.

Why was Iris framed to kill Sergey?

As we soon learn, Josh and Kat planned all of this to kill Sergey. Josh hacked into Iris’ system and changed her aggression and self-defence protocols, along with allowing her to hurt humans too. The idea here was to let her kill Sergey after knowing that he’d try to have sex with her down at the lake

Kat was in on this too, fed up and disgruntled with being his trophy wife. She also knew that he was sitting on 12 million dollars, which happens to be locked away in his safe. The idea was for Kat and Josh to split the money and then frame Iris for the murder, allowing everything to be wrapped up with a neat little bow. However, things don’t turn out that way.

Does Josh kill Iris?

After a load of shenanigans surrounding Iris and Patrick, including the reveal that Patrick is actually a robot too, Josh sits down with Iris while she’s tied up and laments his life. Iris belittles him until Josh changes her intelligence down to 0%. Josh ends up torturing Iris too, and after burning her hand, Josh has her commit suicide.

Josh concocts a story about how Iris she was a jealous, possessive girlfriend when workers from Emphatix show up. This is the company responsible for making these bots, and the two workers check her over but can’t establish a link.

Josh soon realizes, with horror, that everything a companion sees and hears is actually recorded. Even worse, Iris’ CPU is in her chest, not her head, so hit act of torturing and killing the robot could come back to bite him.

However, we  learn through the conversation between the two workers that murdering a bot appears to be a common occurrence, as these two aren’t the least bit surprised. But what they didn’t bank on was Patrick showing and killing the pair.

How does Iris manage to stop Josh?

Meanwhile, Iris awakens after being rebooted and tries to attack Patrick with a taser. When that doesn’t work, she speaks plainly to him and admits the truth about Eli and how he’s the one Patrick is destined to be with, not Josh. Having seen the truth, Patrick decides to kill himself.

Back at the house, Iris is given true freedom after Teddy (one of the Emphatix workers) grants her complete control of her own body and mind, a reward for saving him from the murderous rampage of Patrick. Iris approaches Jack with a gun and tells him that from this moment on, he doesn’t belong to her. In the end, she kills him with a corkscrew. This is actually something that was foreshadowed earlier in the movie, with multiple characters using this corkscrew, so it’s a nice way of bringing this back to the foreground again!

How does Companion end?

After becoming a mass murderer, Iris packs up her stuff and decides to leave the house after killing Josh. She doesn’t change her appearance but she does take Sergey’s car and its the road. Presumably she’s not going to get far because Emphatix will likely be on the case, as will the police.

She finds another Iris bot, who she waves at, before driving down the highway. Of course we know that all Iris bots have their vision and hearing recorded, so this too is going to show up when Emphatix look a bit deeper into this.

The police are also likely to track down the sports car she’s driving and without any skin on her hand, revealing her metallic, skeletal frame, she’ll soon be handed over to the authorities and rebooted back to factory settings. Yay for Iris, I guess?

 

Read More: Companion Movie Review


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