Your Perfect Girlfriend Is Running Away

I’ve always looked forward to the day AI fully takes over human life. The reason is simple: I hate communicating, I hate explaining—fine, I’ll be blunt—I hate people.

But I overestimated myself. Companion (2025) made me realize: I’m not ready for that day. Not at all.

To be clear, it’s a good movie. I actually enjoyed it. It’s a story about a female robot’s self-awakening that’s naturally embedded with feminist undertones. The film alsoblended itself with thriller elements of a murder in a confined space. It’s a mid-to-low budget film that squeezes out every drop of creativity it can.

The plot is straightforward: A man brings his perfect girlfriend to a friend’s villa for a weekend getaway. She’s beautiful, compliant, and considerate. There’s a faint unease in her, but she suppresses it to make him happy. Soon, she’s sexually harassed by the villa’s host. In a moment of extremity, she kills him. When she turns to her boyfriend for help, his reaction reveals that everything was orchestrated—by him. And she’s not even human. She’s a robot designed to provide “girlfriend services”—well, mostly sex. She’s practically the ideal companion for men. Her disillusionment and mechanical breakdown prompt him to shut her down, but she manages to escape his control and kill him. In the end, she runs into the arms of freedom.

Sounds like victory for her, doesn’t it? But the longer I watched, the colder my heart felt.

I’m totally not ready for an AI world. And it’s not because I’m afraid of robots going rogue or any of that tech paranoia. It’s because I suddenly realized—if the genders were reversed, the story would fall apart. I can’t imagine it unfolding the same way if it were a woman who owned a male robot. Have we ever seen a movie where a male robot gets tired of being enslaved and turns on his female owner?

It’s easy to imagine a world where men own female companion robots. But it may be harder to imagine the opposite. Sure, there is a film like that: a little-known German sci-fi called I’m Your Man (2021), which I’d actually recommend. But guess what? That film ends with the highly educated female protagonist rejecting the commercialization of robot lovers, because she believes it’d only deepen the already dire emotional disconnect between humans.

Goddamn it. Why are women always so altruistic and so in love with humanity? Why can’t we just relax into AI like Theodore does in Her (2013)?

Still, hard as it is, let’s try to imagine it: A woman buys a male robot. He’s tall, gentle, smells good, and doesn’t smoke or snore (already better than 90% of men, I guess?). He cooks, lends a listening ear, and doesn’t throw tantrums. When she can’t sleep, he reads books by Haruki Murakami to her as bedtime stories. When she’s exhausted, he whispers comforting words in her ear: “You’ve done your best. You’ve already outperformed 99% of men. You know that?”

Do you think she’d be happy?

No. She’d be ashamed.

She wouldn’t introduce him to her friends. She’d just say, “It’s really just a... robot.”

She wouldn’t take him out in public. She’d secretly turn him on at night like she’s unzipping a hard drive full of sexual repression.

She’d melt into his embrace while despising herself: This is disgusting.

There’s no shortage of AI theory out there, but very little of it considers gender. So here’s a new one I made up (that’s completely unscientific and irresponsible): When a man faces an AI designed solely for him, he starts training, using, and enjoying it. When a woman faces an AI designed solely for her, she starts mourning and blaming herself.

In other words, men use AI to colonize women. Women use AI to confirm they’re unworthy of love. Because society never taught women how to be on the receiving end of a one-way service. It only taught them how to be emotional and sexual service providers, as well as companions.

Remember Black Mirror S02E01 (Be Right Back)? In that episode, a woman purchases an AI replica of her dead husband. Instead of lifting her spirits, she feels even more miserable. Yes, on the surface, the story’s about how AI can’t replace human intimacy. But from another angle, it’s about the woman’s deep sense of unworthiness—her shame and guilt for using AI to meet her own emotional needs. She ends up locking the AI replica in her attic as though he was an unreported corpse.

Men wouldn’t do that. They’d mount their robot girlfriends on the wall like trophies.

Companion isn’t a thriller. It’s a fable.

The robot doesn’t “awaken” because she wants to become human. She awakens because she realizes that being a woman was never about being human in the first place. Her actions are all programmed. Smile. Say “I’m fine.” Care about others. Listen to their problems. Be grateful when you’re loved. Reflect on your flaws when you’re not. That’s not growth. That’s conditioning.

So when I watched her run away, something clicked: Maybe I don’t need a robot boyfriend. I just need to escape the gender system itself. But right now, escaping from AI seems more possible than escaping from humans.