The massive success of Netflix’s futuristic thriller series “Black Mirror” has left burgeoning filmmakers and storytellers fighting to get their work made using a double-edged sword. On one hand, the show has widened the public’s eyes and sharpened their focus on matters of technocratic domination, which is essential for art and media as we move further into the post-digital age. (How that collective fear didn’t stop Elon Musk from becoming a right-hand man-child to the president, I’ll never quite understand.) On the other, its popularity has resulted in a deluge of screenplays that mimic the series’ distinct brand of terror, hoping that viewers will respond to that “Black Mirror” flavor, even if it’s been watered-down to a faint, sour-tasting suggestion.
This onslaught of ignorant “Black Mirror” copycats has reached such cultural saturation that even saying the phenomenon sounds like a plotline from the show feels obnoxiously trite. But what other word than “dystopia” is there for a world where smart techno-thrillers have been all but erased to make way for bland regurgitations of better movies? The latest of these witless reiterations is writer-director Drew Hancock’s debut feature “Companion,” a movie with a decently clever premise that’s squandered right out of the gate, both by the film’s marketing and the movie itself. An early teaser trailer indicated that “Companion” could be a fun, freaky good time, while a more recent spate of promotion revealed the film’s central plot point that its initial marketing took care to keep under wraps. With that key narrative element out in the open, the movie’s beats are all too easy to predict, diffusing what little humor there was left to garner from its meager amount of twists.
