Live Your Truth

We live in weird times. Companion, Love Hurts and Heart Eyes were all playing at the multiplex by February 14^th, often preceded by the trailer for Novocaine, another bloody love story (kind of) that opened in March. Maybe it’s an indication of the national mood, or maybe it’s just that genre fare is enjoying a higher success rate at the box-office these days. At any rate, I can’t remember a Valentine’s season with so much blood in it … and I managed to miss it entirely.

Fortunately, Companion and Love Hurts both landed on disc this past Tuesday, so I had the chance to catch up. Heart Eyes arrives on disc on the 15th, if you’re keeping track, and Novocaine should have its street date by then. I’ll cover them when I can.

We’ll start with Companion, which led the charge with a late-January opening – which, like the weeks before and after Labor Day, is usually where studios dump a picture they have no faith in, or don’t know how to market. But not here.

For one, Warner was very high on the movie, since it was originally going to be Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 cult hit Barbarian – and though Cregger ultimately ceded the director’s chair to the film’s writer, Drew Hancock, he stayed on as a producer, shaping an oblique marketing campaign worthy of A24. That first theatrical teaser was a masterpiece of unsettling imagery without a shred of context; the trailer gave away a lot more, but also nodded in the direction of the absurdist streak that makes Companion so much fun.

I would prefer not to reveal anything about Companion, which stars Sophie Thatcher as the very nice, very considerate Iris, whose lakeside getaway with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) and his friends leads to her self-actualization – and no small amount of bloodshed. And while both the poster and the disc packaging makes it pretty clear what Iris’ deal is, that's not the only revelation Hancock springs on us; like Barbarian, Companion is a genre picture that is very, very smart about how it tells the story it’s telling. It knows we’ve seen the movies that came before it, and plays with our expectations in a really graceful way. The larger allegory about Iris and Josh’s toxic relationship is just the start.

Even before she steps over the threshold, Iris is worried she won’t impress Josh’s friends. Chipper Eli (Harvey Guillén) and doting Patrick (Lukas Gage) have their own thing going on, and the transactional pairing of Russian millionaire Sergey (Rupert Friend) and Josh’s old pal Kat (Megan Suri) is its own weird deal. Thatcher is such an interesting, engaging presence that we can’t wait for her to win them over. And that is … not what happens at all.

Instead, Companion opens itself up into an inventive and very entertaining mash-up of a certain Alex Garland film and a certain Coralie Fargeat film, with Hancock having a great time yes-anding his own premise while making sure the actors know they’re allowed to have fun with it too. I’ve enjoyed Thatcher in Yellowjackets and Heretic but she is absolutely amazing in this, expressing Iris’ contorted thought processes with unsettlingly elastic facial expressions and soldiering through a series of physical challenges with a resolve that immediately puts us on her side.

Which, amazingly enough, was not the original thrust of the project; in this very fun episode of The Writer’s Panel, Hancock tells my podcast pal Ben Blacker it wasn’t until he was well into the first draft that he realized he was sympathizing with Iris rather than Josh and his pals. (Again, don’t listen until you’ve seen the movie.)  

Anyway, I wish I’d had the chance to see Companion with an audience – preferably in IMAX, because Eli Born shot the hell out of this thing. It would have been a blast.

Conversely, I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed the big-screen experience of Love Hurts, which opened the following week and was basically pilloried by every single critic I know.

And … well, I can sort of see why. Jonathan Eusebio’s sunlit shoot-em-up is not especially deep, and mostly just an excuse for Ke Huy Quan to once again show off his action chops as about a milquetoast realtor who turns out to be a secret badass, and must use all of his skills as a former gangland enforcer to save both himself and the woman he loves, Rose – played by Quan’s fellow Oscar winner Ariana DeBose – from the wrath of Marvin’s evil brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu).

As the latest of John Wick producer David Leitch’s wrong-dude-wrong-time projects, following Nobody and Violent Night, Love Hurts does have a bit of a prefab feel to it. It doesn’t really challenge Quan in any way – Marvin Gable feels a lot like a rebadged version of his Oscar-winning role as Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Waymond Wang, a fundamentally decent guy who also happens to be able to kick people through walls – and the fact that Marvin is two decades older than his love interest is something the movie never really addresses.

But as a well-made B-movie? It’s not not entertaining. Quan is a charming leading man, and it’s fun to watch him unapologetically channel Jackie Chan’s improvisational fighting style in the action scenes, scrambling to stay out of a thug’s reach and dodging the various bullets, knives and crockery thrown at him in various throwdowns. Eusebio, a stunt coordinator making his directorial debut, makes sure each set piece has its own rhythm and aesthetic, and while he’s not the most innovative director of actors he does find room for a great comic turn from Lio Tipton (of Damsels in Distress and Crazy Stupid Love) as Marvin’s depressed assistant, who comes fully to life when she falls for warrior-poet Raven (Mustafa Shakir, from Netflix’ live-action Cowboy Bebop series), one of several murder-men coming for Marvin.

There are some other complications – maybe a few too many – about various schemes among Knuckles’ lieutenants, and one gets the sense that DeBose had a lot more to offer than the script could allow. But honestly, this is the kind of movie that would have been a perfectly acceptable evening’s entertainment in the olden days of low-stakes action pictures; hell, if it had come out of Hong Kong in 1996 it would have been a cult classic.

Universal’s special edition of Love Hurts offers short featurettes on Quan, the ensemble and the stunts; the latter is obviously the most fun. We also get about seven minutes of deleted and extended scenes – none of them essential – and an alternate ending that’s a little more biting than the one that was used.

The supplements are identical on both the 4K and the BD, which is also the case on Warner’s separate Companion releases – which also include three short featurettes, as it turns out. There’s some great footage of Thatcher sliding in and out of character on the set, it’s fun to watch the actors talk about how they approached their multifaceted characters – there’s a whole segment on how Guillen’s Eli is the only person in the whole movie who has nothing to hide from the camera – and Hancock and his collaborators discuss their decision to use practical effects whenever possible, the better to keep the audience wondering exactly what's real and what isn't.

And both films look great in 4K, sporting bright colors and razor-sharp imagery. Trust me, the screen grabs from Companion you see here don't do it justice – something to do with the HDR grade, I think.

Both titles also sport Dolby Atmos audio; as you might guess, Love Hurts has the more active soundstage – gunfire, shattering glass, shredding drywall, the old-school thwack of fists on faces, things of that nature – but Companion has fun with its subtler mix, especially in the scenes that find Iris listening to the wilderness. Does she perceive the world differently than we do, or is Hancock just playing tricks with us? Either way, something’s going on there – and it’s always better when movies reward us for paying attention.

Companion is available in individual 4K and BD editions from Warner Home Entertainment, and Love Hurts is available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo and a standard BD edition from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

Up next: Via Vision brings Man Bites Dog, In the Bedroom and Shattered Glass to all-region Blu, and Arrow continues to treat Renny Harlin like a king with a 4K special edition of The Long Kiss Goodnight. You kind of have to see it to believe it.

(And yes, I’m still waiting on Babygirl and The Brutalist. Sorry.)