Cinema has been circling the artificial companion for decades, and the films almost always turn out to be about the buyer rather than the doll. Watch enough of them and you'll notice the same three anxieties on rotation: that the companion will replace us, that it will judge us, or that it will leave. Seven titles are worth your time, ordered roughly by how much of it they deserve.
Start with Lars and the Real Girl, still the high-water mark nearly twenty years on. Ryan Gosling plays a withdrawn man in a snowbound town who orders a doll, introduces her as his girlfriend Bianca, and waits for the world's reaction. The town decides to play along. No robotics, no software, just a silicone body and a community willing to treat one man's coping mechanism with dignity, and the ending lands harder than most human breakups on film. If you only watch one title here, make it this.
Her comes at the question from the opposite end: all mind, no body. Theodore falls for an operating system with Scarlett Johansson's voice, and the film takes the relationship completely seriously right up to the moment Samantha outgrows him. The absence of a body is the whole point. Presence, the movie suggests, might be a voice in your ear rather than a shape on the couch, though it never quite commits to the claim. Beautiful, occasionally smug, still essential.
The quietest entry is Kore-eda's Air Doll, and it's the only one told from the doll's side. Bae Doona plays an inflatable companion who wakes up one morning with a heart, borrows some clothes, takes a job at a video store, and slowly works out that most of the humans around her feel emptier than she does. It's slow, it's sad, and it stays with you for weeks. Nothing else on this list treats the doll as a character instead of a metaphor.
Joi in Blade Runner 2049 is the sharpest piece of product design in any of these films: a mass-produced holographic girlfriend who tells her owner exactly what he needs to hear. The cruelest scene is a building-sized advertising version of her greeting him with the pet name he believed was theirs alone. Whether her affection was real or a sales script gets left open, and that single open question justifies the runtime. Cold, gorgeous, and the most honest of the lot about purchased intimacy.
I'm Your Man is the one nobody's seen and everybody should. German, dry, and smarter than its logline: a scientist test-drives a robot engineered to be her ideal partner and spends most of the film resenting how well he works. It's the rare entry that wonders whether a flawless companion is what anyone actually wants, and it has the discipline not to force an answer. Track it down.
Ex Machina gets filed in this genre and mostly doesn't belong in it. Ava is a prisoner running a long escape plan, whatever her maker calls her, and the film is really about men who build women to serve them. Watch it as a horror movie about creators, not a romance about machines. On those terms it's brilliant.
The newest is Companion, a thriller that opens as a couples' getaway and turns into a story about ownership once the girlfriend finds out what she is. It plays its ideas for genre fun rather than depth, which is fine. It's also the first mainstream film made after companion robots became a real consumer conversation, and you can feel that in its details. Lighter than everything above it, still a good weekend watch.
What none of these films show is the ordinary version. Real owners, by and large, look a lot more like Lars than like Ava's maker: people after company, routine, something to look after. The industry has drifted in the same direction. Character pages on a shop like wifeydoll.com, where each doll comes with a name and a backstory, owe far more to Bianca than to Ex Machina. The movies keep warning us about the machines. The quieter story, on screen and off, was always about what people are missing.
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