2026 • 95 min
Company
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
On a winter night in 1975, a mysterious woman arrives uninvited at a Christmas party. Her arrival disrupts the gathering’s fragile normality and sets in motion a story that crosses through time.
The woman tells of Tom, an elderly and solitary man who, during a snowstorm in Colorado in 1953, comes to the aid of an actress who has become stranded. Forced to share the same space and the same night, the two begin telling each other stories. And the actress’s story leads even further back in time, to a farming couple who takes a troubled young drifter into their home, while mysterious murders unfold in the surrounding area.
The different stories gradually begin to overlap, revealing a web of solitude, desire, violence, grief, and supernatural presences. Vampires, blood, and death belong as much to the film’s Gothic universe as they do to its reflection on the transmission of suffering: what happens to someone does not necessarily end with them, but can continue to live on in others, transforming itself into memory, fear, resentment, or revenge.
Review
4 min read
Reviewed by Fabian
· 09. September 2026
Do not wish for the disappearance of any of your miseries, but rather for the grace that will transform them.
— Simone Weil
— Simone Weil
Company is a claustrophobic, icy, almost lifeless film. A film in which there seems to be very little air, very little light, very little possibility of escape. Casey Affleck constructs his Gothic world as a prolonged confinement within closed rooms, isolated houses, snow-covered landscapes, and interminable nights, where time seems to have come to a standstill and the dead have no intention of leaving the living in peace.
Its structure is that of a story within a story: one story contains another, which in turn preserves yet another. The past is therefore not something that is merely remembered, but something that continues to happen. People change, die, disappear; what they have lived through, however, remains and passes through others. And it is precisely here that Company takes us by surprise.
Because beneath the film’s profoundly dark surface, beneath the murders, the cold, and the funereal atmosphere, Affleck introduces an almost unexpected idea: perhaps not everything that happens to us needs to be fought. Perhaps not every wound demands a response. Perhaps some things, before they can be understood or avenged, simply need to be accepted.
It is a message that risks appearing almost too ecumenical, almost consoling: accepting the other, accepting pain, accepting what we cannot change. And yet, precisely because it emerges from such a dark universe, it ultimately acquires a certain force.
Revenge, in the film, appears in fact as another way of perpetuating evil. Fighting what has wounded us often means allowing it to continue living inside us. Pain then becomes a contagious substance, something that passes from one body to another, from one generation to the next, exactly like the blood of vampires.
The alternative is not necessarily forgiveness — a concept that may still be too moral — but acceptance: acknowledging that something has happened, that someone has changed us, that reality cannot always be reduced to a reassuring order. And choosing, despite this, not to return the evil we have received.
Is it a philosophy of surrender? In part, yes, but not necessarily one of defeat. Rather, it is a surrender to existence, to its opacity, to its irreducible ambiguity. Not everything has to be explained, resolved, or punished. Some things can only be lived through.
Perhaps the film’s limitation lies precisely in its atmospheric insistence: its Gothic form is so closed, rarefied, and mortuary that it risks suffocating what it wishes to say. At times, Company seems more interested in creating a sensory condition than in fully developing its own intuitions. But it is also this lifeless quality that makes it distinctive.
Because in the end, behind its nocturnal creatures and its stories of blood, Company does not really seem to be about vampires. It is about us when we become incapable of letting go of what has made us suffer. About the dead we continue to carry within us. About the guilt we inherit. About wounds that, if they are not accepted, continually seek another body in which to survive.
A film about the transmission of suffering and the possibility of breaking its cycle.
Every generation receives something from the one before it. It may receive guilt, grief, violence, fear, revenge — but it may also receive a gesture of mercy.
And here the title becomes perfect.
True “company” is not simply about being together; it is about not leaving someone alone inside their pain.
And perhaps this is precisely what Affleck seems to be saying through the film’s entire nested structure: people die, but stories continue; and when a story passes from one person to another, it can transmit both the poison and the antidote.
The film therefore seems to advance a very precise thesis:
we cannot change what has happened to us, but we can decide what to pass on from what has happened to us.
And I find it particularly significant that Affleck has said, speaking about the film, that he spent much of his life “keeping score” of debts and acts of kindness, and eventually came to believe that the balance is not settled by the world, but by what we choose to give. It is a statement that illuminates almost perfectly the film’s moral core.
Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
This movie was in the official competition of 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026
