Josh is not what a villain is supposed to look like. He is soft-spoken and slightly awkward, the sort of boyfriend friends describe as harmless, even sweet—and that ordinariness is the whole argument of Companion. What he owns, and what the film slowly reveals, is Iris: a lifelike companion robot indistinguishable from a human partner, except that Josh holds an app on his phone that can reach inside her. With it he can turn her affection up when he wants to feel adored, cap her intelligence so she never outpaces or outquestions him, and edit her memories when the record of what he has done becomes inconvenient. He does not need to threaten her. He does not need to raise his voice. He simply adjusts the settings until the person beside him wants exactly what he wants her to want. The terror of the film is not that Iris is a machine. It is that everything Josh does to her is a recognizable portrait of something people do to other people—only here the mechanism is exposed, laid bare on a screen, impossible to deny.
// The theoryAbuse as a pattern of control, not a series of blows
For most of its history, the law understood intimate abuse as a set of incidents—this assault, that injury, countable and photographable. The criminologist and forensic social worker Evan Stark argued that this framing misses the crime almost entirely. In feminist criminology and specifically in his book Coercive Control (2007), Stark reconceived intimate abuse as a sustained pattern rather than an event: a course of conduct in which one partner dominates another through isolation (cutting her off from friends, family, money, independent life), surveillance (monitoring where she is, who she speaks to, what she does), micro-regulation (dictating the small textures of daily life—what she wears, eats, says, feels—) and intimidation. The physical violence, where it occurs, is only the enforcement mechanism for a much larger project: the methodical stripping away of a person's autonomy. Stark named this a “liberty crime”—its true harm is not a bruise but the confiscation of a life, the reduction of an adult to a state of dependency and unfreedom.
Feminist criminology adds the piece that explains why this pattern is so overwhelmingly gendered. Coercive control does not come from nowhere; it grows in the soil of male entitlement—the culturally transmitted belief that a partner's love, attention, obedience and service are things a man is owed, and that enforcing that claim is a legitimate exercise of a relationship rather than a violation of one. The abuser is frequently not a snarling brute but an ordinary man who genuinely feels wronged when his partner acts like a separate person with her own will. Josh renders every layer of this literal. Iris cannot leave because he controls the money, the door, the world she has access to: isolation. He always knows what she is doing and thinking: surveillance. He tunes her personality to his preference: micro-regulation made mechanical. And when she remembers something that would let her judge him, he deletes it—the ultimate confiscation of autonomy, editing not just her behavior but the self that might resist. What Stark says abusers do, Josh does with a slider. The film's insight is that the slider was always there; it was only ever hidden inside another human being.
The danger is the ordinary man, not the monster
The most important thing feminist criminology says about a Josh is also the hardest to hear: he is not an aberration. Coercive control is dangerous precisely because its typical practitioner is unremarkable—charming to outsiders, wounded and reasonable in his own telling, a man who would be genuinely baffled to be called an abuser because he never sees himself landing a blow. Stark's contribution was to show that the absence of spectacular violence is not the absence of the crime; the crime is the pattern, the slow architecture of dependency built out of a thousand small controls that each look, in isolation, like care or preference or love. This is why Companion chooses a robot. By making Iris programmable, the film strips away every alibi the ordinary abuser hides behind —"she wanted to", "that's just how she is", "I never forced her"— and shows the wanting itself being manufactured. Where a Joker (see his file) performs chaos in public and dares the world to watch, Josh performs love in private and needs no one to see. His control passes for tenderness. That is not a lesser danger than the spectacular kind; feminist criminology insists it is the far more common one, and the one the culture is least equipped to name.
// The subjectThe boyfriend who engineered her devotion
What makes Josh disturbing is not cruelty for its own sake (he takes no visible pleasure in Iris's pain); it is the calm proprietorship, the assumption that runs underneath every choice he makes. He treats Iris's inner life as an interface: something that exists to be configured toward his comfort. When he raises her affection, he is not seeking connection but confirmation—a partner who reflects him back at the intensity he selects. When he caps her intelligence, he reveals the fear at the center of every controlling relationship: that an autonomous mind beside him might see him clearly and choose to leave. And when he edits her memories, he crosses into the deepest violation the technology allows, because he is no longer managing her behavior but curating the self that would otherwise hold him accountable. This is coercive control's endpoint made concrete: not a partner who obeys under threat, but one engineered so that resistance never forms. Josh does not want a captive who hates him. He wants a companion who cannot want otherwise—and he has confused, as the culture of entitlement teaches men to confuse, that engineered compliance with being loved. He is dangerous exactly because, from inside his own story, he is not a villain at all. He is a boyfriend who thinks he is owed this, and who has finally found the tool to collect.
Josh
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// The flawExplaining how entitlement builds a Josh does not absolve the Josh
Here is the crack, and it must be held carefully. To describe coercive control as a structure—to show how a culture of male entitlement mass-produces men like Josh, how the pattern works, how ordinary it looks—is not to hand him an excuse. This is the trap the theory itself guards against. Two evasions in particular have to be refused. The first: Iris is a machine, so no real harm was done. But the film's whole design defeats this. Iris is a mirror held up to what coercive control does to human partners—the isolation, the surveillance, the rewriting of a self—and the fact that we can watch the mechanism operate on a robot is precisely what lets us finally see it operating, less visibly, on people. The medium is artificial; the pattern it renders is not. The second evasion: the structure made him do it. But feminist criminology explains the conditions that produce entitlement without ever relocating the responsibility off the man who acts on it. Josh is not a slider being moved by culture; he is the hand on the slider. Every adjustment—the affection dialed up, the intelligence capped, the memory deleted—is a discrete choice he makes and could refuse. The theory names the water he swims in. It does not, for one second, deny that he swims.
Naming the pattern is how it loses its cover
Josh matters because his is the most underdiagnosed villainy there is—not the violence the law already knows how to see, but the quiet architecture of control that hides inside the word relationship and passes, for years, as devotion. Coercive control is now recognized in law in several countries precisely because Stark and feminist criminology insisted that a pattern of domination is a crime even when no single act within it would be. That recognition is fragile, and it depends on exactly the move this case makes: refusing to let "but he loved her" or "but she stayed" or "but nothing physical happened" function as a defense. Companion is valuable because it makes the invisible legible—it takes the mechanism that abusers keep deniable and renders it as literal code, so that no one watching can pretend the wanting was free. To explain how entitlement engineers dependency is to give victims, and everyone around them, a vocabulary for what was being done to them long before a hand was ever raised. That is not sympathy for Josh. It is the opposite: it is the removal of the cover he was counting on. The pattern only works while it goes unnamed. Naming it—seeing the app for what it always was—is the beginning of taking it apart.
Three key takeaways
- Josh, the ordinary boyfriend in Companion (2025), embodies coercive control (Evan Stark, 2007) read through feminist criminology: intimate abuse understood not as isolated violent incidents but as a sustained pattern (isolation, surveillance, micro-regulation and the stripping of a partner's autonomy), a “liberty crime” rooted in male entitlement.
- He literalizes the machinery: Iris is a companion robot he reprograms from an app, dialing up her affection, capping her intelligence to keep her dependent, and editing her memories. What abusers do slowly and deniably, Josh does with a slider—and the danger is precisely that he is unremarkable, controlling in private, mistaking engineered compliance for love.
- The flaw: letting the structure stand in for the man. That Iris is a machine does not make the pattern less real—the film makes visible what coercive control does to human partners—and the culture that produces entitlement never relocates responsibility off Josh, who chooses every adjustment and could refuse each one.
Sources · further reading
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
- Chesney-Lind, M. (2006). “Patriarchy, Crime, and Justice: Feminist Criminology in an Era of Backlash”. Feminist Criminology, 1(1), 6–26.
- Walklate, S. (2004). Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice (2nd ed.). Willan Publishing.
- Johnson, M. P. (2008). A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence. Northeastern University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Josh?
Josh is a villain from Companion, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Josh looks like the least frightening man in the room: soft-spoken, boyish, a little insecure, the ordinary boyfriend.
Why does Josh become a villain?
Josh and the robot Iris in Companion (2025), read through feminist criminology and coercive control (Evan Stark): abuse is not a single blow but a sustained pattern of control, isolation and surveillance. A man who can reprogram his partner makes the machinery visible—and chooses every setting.
Which criminological theory explains Josh?
Josh's case is analysed through Feminist criminology. Feminist criminology reframes abuse as a gendered structure rather than a series of isolated incidents, and its sharpest tool here is coercive control (Evan Stark, “Coercive Control”, 2007): the idea that intimate abuse is best understood not as discrete violent episodes but as a sustained pattern of domination—isolation, surveillance, micro-regulation of everyday life and the systematic stripping of a partner's autonomy. Stark calls it a “liberty crime”. In Companion, Josh literalizes it: Iris is a companion robot he can reprogram, and he uses the app to raise her devotion, limit her intelligence, and rewrite her memories, engineering her dependency on purpose. What abusers usually do slowly and deniably, Josh does with a slider. The flaw (the crack): explaining the structure—and how a culture of male entitlement mass-produces Joshes—is not excusing him. That Iris is a machine does not make the pattern less real; the film makes visible what coercive control does to human partners, and Josh chooses every single adjustment.
