In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and Dave Franco) find themselves stranded in a mysterious, underground chamber after being caught in the rain while hiking in the woods. The chamber, which looks as though it’s taken decorating tips from the Bhutanese cave at the beginning of The Empty Man, has a murky pool of water at its center, and after Tim drinks from it (ignoring Millie’s concerns), he finds himself forcefully drawn to the woman he’d previously demonstrated reluctance to commit to. As in literally. When they awake, still on the floor of the chamber, Tim finds a sticky film has developed on his leg, effectively functioning as industrial-grade super glue, briefly adhering his skin to Millie’s. And things don’t exactly get better once he violently rips himself free of her and they climb free, returning home. Despite claiming, in a heated exchange, that he feels like a prisoner in their own home with no real sense of identity or autonomy in the relationship, Tim develops an uncontrollable physical compulsion to be near his new fiancée, which manifests itself in some alarming ways: things like being guided, as if by an invisible hand, to be close to her even when she’s at work, or how, when he’s asleep, he unwittingly sucks the hair from her head down his throat (it all a bit like the psychic bond between E.T. and Elliott, only with less whimsy). The one-time commitment phobe has been struck by an insidious case of codependency; he’s being tormented by a metaphor.
What Together is doing here isn’t exactly subtle, although in fairness to Shanks and the film, it’s hard to say that subtlety was ever the objective. Early scenes are larded with dialogue solely for the benefit of the audience that paints a portrait of an atrophying relationship. Gigging musician Tim has long dreamed of being a rockstar, but, now 35, his “taking the plunge” and moving upstate with Millie seems to be an acknowledgement that his career is going nowhere and he’s clinging to her as a lifeline (she at least has the stability of being an in-demand grade school teacher). We’re told that the couple haven’t had sex in forever, with Millie falling into a practiced habit of propositioning Tim and anticipating him politely rebuffing her with some variation on how tired he is and saying “maybe tomorrow.” The film gradually doles out a traumatic backstory for Tim that dovetails with the themes of the film while also explaining his recent disinterest in intimacy, but the routines and rhythms may strike a nerve with anyone who’s been in a relationship that’s shifted into a gear where you start to feel more like roommates than lovers. Even that recent engagement comes with a rather damning asterisk: tired of waiting for Tim to take the lead after all this time, Millie instead proposes to him in front of all their friends at their going-away party, and he’s so dumbstruck (either by the inversion of traditional gender roles or that he’d never contemplated marrying her) that he leaves her hanging, still on bended knee, for a small eternity before eventually mumbling “yes.”
Body-horror is a rather pliable subgenre when it comes to social commentary — one need only look back to last year’s Best Picture-nominated The Substance to identify a recent example that permeated the zeitgeist — and Shanks has devised a skin-crawling (literally) scenario to explore fears of losing one’s individualism and, indeed, the entire sense of the self by committing to another person, which is represented here as two bodies physically merging together. At first, Millie is relegated to a concerned maternal surrogate. She tends to Tim’s emotional and physical wounds while becoming increasingly exasperated by his newfound clinginess, which even lends the film a Freudian bent as Tim desires, on the most primal of levels, to be physically inside of her. However, after an impromptu, rather painful, tryst in a school toilet, the sickness passes to Millie as well, and soon they’re functioning almost as living magnets. Tim and Millie’s attempts to quarantine one another at opposite ends of the house fail as their bodies override their willpower, contorting themselves into inhuman permutations (accompanied by considerable “cracking and snapping” foley effects), dragging them by their fingertips toward one another before bloodlessly grafting their arms together. Needless to say, separating from one another in the morning isn’t quite so bloodless, as it requires several belts of whiskey, muscle relaxers, and a Sawzall (it should be addressed that while the electric saw moment is prominently featured in the film’s marketing, gorehounds will probably be disappointed with how much is elided in the sequence, presumably as a budgetary concession).
For all of the DIY surgery and rubbery conjoined prosthetics — there’s a subplot in the film about a couple of missing hikers with echoes of our main characters which belatedly provides the requisite, creature-feature jump scare — what’s likely to be triggering for some viewers is how it presents the fairly commonplace ebbs and flows (and the anxieties that come with them) of cohabitation and fidelity as something abnormal. In the film, sharing your life with someone and sacrificing some amount of personal freedom to do it is literally akin to an alien presence invading the body and robbing one of their self-governance and even personhood. Sounds hyperbolic, sure, but, then, there’s a reason even many happy couples keep separate checking accounts and bathrooms. The film seems to be cheekily arguing that you can only go so far as two individuals and that true equilibrium can only be achieved when you tear down the barriers you put up between yourself and your partner and embrace functioning as a single cohesive unit. Essentially, learn to stop worrying and love combining your record collections and quiet nights at home watching the same junky reality shows.
Together is so message-first in its approach there’s never any shortage of symbolism to note as everything tends to be laid directly on the surface. It’s the sort of film where characters quote Plato in everyday conversation simply so we can get an ominous callback to it later on, or it sets up its tongue-in-cheek climatic needle drop so far in advance that you’re going to kick yourself when you finally hear it. However, it’s somewhat more academic qualities threaten to stifle its effectiveness as a genre film. Together has its squeamish moments, but it’s not particularly thrilling on the whole, and everything other than the Brie-Franco dynamic (both actors admirably commit to the punishing pratfalls required of the scenario) feels rather anemic by comparison. The film can’t decide whether the mythology of the chamber — we’re eventually told it was once a “new age” chapel that collapsed into the ground — is entirely irrelevant or hugely consequential, which leads to late exposition dumps — including the old standby of the incriminating home video playing on the off chance one of our heroes wanders into what is ostensibly an empty house — from the secondary antagonist hiding in plain sight who delivers off-brand Clive Barker lines like “the ultimate intimacy in divine flesh.” Even more frustrating, the film seems to be working backwards from the revelation in its final shot; waving off both the psychological implications — which feels very much the point of the entire film — as well as the practical realities for a cute “gotcha.” Together wants you to think very much about what this all means but, at the same time, not very deeply about it.
DIRECTOR: Michael Shanks; CAST: Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Damon Herriman, Mia Morrissey; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: July 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
Originally published as part of Fantasia Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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