The Sex Robot Murder Comedy

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The sex robot murder comedy is, of course, the new movie Companion, which stars Sophie Thatcher as (spoiler alert!) a sex robot who goes on to murder her “owner,” played by Jack “Son of Dennis” Quaid, in ways that I presume are funny. I haven’t actually seen the film yet, but I’d like to! I’m really only writing about it because the other day Jessica “No Relation” Grose used “the sex robot murder comedy” in her New York Times column, and I just think that as a piece of writing, it’s a fantastic phrase.

What gives the phrase its power? First, it’s the individual elements, each of which stands alone, clear and iconic. There are no euphemisms here. Each word is brief and direct, recognizable and commonplace. You don’t have to look anything up, or wonder whether the word means what you thought it did, or whether a secondary definition is being referenced here. The phrase means what it says it means, and because it’s not trying to be clever, it winds up being very clever indeed.

Then there’s the collision of the elements—the surprise factor, even if we already know what the movie is about, of seeing sex against robot, murder against comedy, and the two interior phrases against each other. But as surprising as they are, the smaller combinations still manage to evoke highly specific ideas; you’re not confused about the concept of a sex robot, nor of a murder comedy. Those also stand alone, until they’re mashed together by our brains into a phrase that can also mean just one thing—the movie Companion. Sure, there may be another sex robot murder comedy out there, but not today, in February 2025. The definite article “the” pinpoints it.

The cadence plays nicely here, too: We get the staccato effect of the first three words—DA, DA-da, DA-da—which comedy, as it’s wont to do, plays off of with a subtle elongation, DA-da-da, that smoothes it all out and carries us through to the end. Comedy makes the phrase whole. And kudos to the copy editors who refrained from interrupting the flow with hyphens: “sex-robot murder-comedy” is too constrained, too didactic. It presumes we’re not smart enough to parse it out, or that there’s some ambiguity that needs to be pinned down.

What I love most about the phrase is that it doesn’t feel written. I can’t imagine Jessica Grose spent a lot of time puzzling over it—it looks like the kind of thing that would just emerge as she was putting the sentence together. But even if she did, even if she paused for a few minutes attempting to encapsulate Companion in a single tight phrase, what she came up with looks spontaneous and inevitable. After reading it, you wonder how else anyone could ever describe that movie.

This is one of the hardest things to do in writing: to name things properly. And yet it’s also one of the things you have to do all the time. I like to think of myself as a decent writer, and I struggle with it, too. In fact, I find I often write around that struggle, substituting extra clauses, unconventional asides, and dumb-ass puns for direct engagement. But I also like to think I’ve made that a strength, too. There’s power in cadence, in playing with the flow of a sentence to make it go places you wouldn’t expect, even if it’s circling a bullseye it never quite hits. I’d also like to think that’s an expression of literary philosophy: The struggle of the sentence to say what it means is the point. And that struggle, though it may never resolve, can still be beautiful and entertaining and fulfilling. Each sentence is a journey from one place to another and maybe back again; put all those sentences in the right order, and you’ve got a story.

Back when I was a travel writer, and especially when I was starting out, this was a bit of an issue for my editors. They had to ask me, quite frequently, to write about what things looked like. I might be in Venice or in Shanghai or in Newport, Rhode Island, but I was always reluctant to describe my surroundings in visual terms. Often I relied on a kind of shorthand meant to evoke a visual description without truly saying what things looked like: Shanghai’s Bund was a “stretch of Greek temple banks, Neo-Classical-style skyscrapers and Art Deco hotels,” which sounds concrete but isn’t—it just lets you fill in the blanks with your own projections.

To me, how a place feels is more important than how it looks. This description of Jerusalem, for example, doesn’t contain a lot of precise visuals, but it conveys the atmosphere back in 2012:

That’s not bad, I guess, but I wish I could nail the description with an even greater degree of precision. I wish I could write like Émile Zola, the late 19th-century writer who’s most famous for his “J’Accuse!” essay decrying antisemitism in French government and society, but whose novels—Germinal, La Bête Humaine, Nana, and L’Assommoir, among many others—are masterworks of precision, both in plotting and in language. The guy seemed to know everything about coal mining, for instance, or railroad systems, or Haussmannian architecture, or low-class gin mills, including all of the technical jargon and everyday slang needed to immerse his readers in those worlds. And maybe I could get there, too, if I could fill my brain with the details of the world outside my head like Zola did. Instead, I’m looking forward to watching the sex robot murder comedy—hm, what would Zola do with a story like that?—although maybe I’ll wait till it’s streaming. 🪨🪨🪨

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