Review: “Together”

Almost everything about Together— the debut feature from writer and director Michael Shanks— is precise. The formal rigor of its lore-heavy script. The perfectly matched leads in Dave Franco and Allison Brie, long-term partners in real life playing long-term partners on screen. The exquisitely-rendered visual effects, which are just squirm-inducing enough to make the audience uneasy without the horror lightweights tapping out. But body horror is messy. It’s outrageous. The unnatural and uncontrollable manipulation of the physical form— through mutilation, or sex, or transformation into another creature entirely— becomes a manifestation of psychological worries pushed to their most extreme. It isn’t that Together doesn’t do that. If anything, it’s a veritable metaphor sledgehammer, the literal merging of two bodies serving as sharp but narrow commentary on the nature of codependency, when you’ve been in a relationship with another person for so long you lose sight of where one of you ends and the other begins. But it never pushes its concepts, either visually or thematically, to any sort of extreme. In short, it needs to be nastier.

Franco and Brie play Tim and Millie, a couple who are preparing to move to a house they bought in the countryside. Tim is a struggling musician, Millie just accepted a job teaching elementary school (hence the move). That their relationship is at as extreme ends as their respective careers is obvious almost immediately when, at a going away party in front of all their friends and loved ones, Millie pops an impromptu proposal on Tim, getting down on one knee and posing an invisible ring box in her hands in front of it. Tim’s response is one of awkward confusion— “Are you being serious?”— before reluctantly accepting. It soon becomes clear that Tim— who has to make his gigs work around when Millie can take him to the train station, and who is still reeling from the recent loss of his parents— resents how much he depends on Millie.

That dependency takes a new shape after Tim and Millie embark on a hike in the woods surrounding their home, promptly get lost in a downpour, and, while following a trail of bells emblazoned with a mysterious symbol, fall in a cave. After spending the night together there, they being to experience strange phenomena. They wake up with their legs attached by a sticky, gooey substance. They begin to feel sick any time one of them ventures farther from the other. And eventually, they find themselves physically pulled into each other’s orbit, as if they were magnetized.

Together contains the odd supporting character, namely Damon Herriman’s Jamie, Millie’s overly-friendly colleague who turns out to also be their new neighbor. But this is mostly Franco and Brie’s show, and their off-screen relationship informs their on-screen one, playing off of each other with ease even as their characters are pushed into increasingly extreme and gross circumstances. Together’s script is as funny— perhaps more so— than it is upsetting or scary, and both actors’ penchant for portraying high-strung characters serve them well here. That script is also predictable, somehow both lean and weighted down with backstory, although the narrative’s endgame feels less pressing when the journey to get there is wild and fun. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to feel like everything in Together could have been taken up another notch. There is, for instance, a hysterically cringeworthy sex scene at the movie’s center. But Together never leans hard into the intersection of unsettling grossness and eroticism that defines such seminal body horror pictures as the work of David Cronenberg (arguably culminating in his 2022 feature Crimes of the Future, in which body modification has literally become sex), or Brian Yuzna’s 1989 film Society, which twists the body into disgustingly warped ways all while providing trenchant social commentary on how the upper class preys on the lower. Even last year’s The Substance, while engaging in similarly obviously metaphor, revels in the disgusting disintegration of the body. Impressive, fleshy body morphing and contortion effects aside (that do, to its credit, briefly get crazy in the film’s final act), it always feels like Together holds back from fully going there, never lingering on the body for too long, cutting away before things escalate.  The result is a film that’s oddly sweet— accepting how much you need another person, regardless of the cost— and palatable for a wide range of viewers. It’s also carefully crafted— Tim and Millie’s oneness are demonstrated the first time we see them at their party, Millie commenting to Tim how everyone is saying how cute it is that they essentially dressed the same. It’s a commendable debut feature for Shanks, and one that plays effectively with a game crowd. But it doesn’t contain enough substance either in front of the camera or under the surface to prevent it from ultimately being absorbed by its boundary-pushing influences.

Together opens in theaters on July 30. Runtime: 102 minutes. Rated R.