“Together”: the two-in-one of marital terror

The debut feature film by Australian Michael Shanks, Together is one of those films that's difficult to talk about without revealing important plot points or spoiling the story for anyone reading these lines and considering seeing it. Let's start by saying that Together , starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who are a real-life couple, is a well-calibrated combination of a dark romantic comedy, a drama about a couple going through a difficult phase in their long relationship, and physical horror in the vein of David Cronenberg, with a touch of the more radical Stephen King.

[Watch the “Together” trailer:]

Tim (Franco) is a rock musician who's never had a solid career, and Millie (Brie) is a teacher. They've been together for 10 years, never married, and are still in love but going through a period of unease. So, they decide to leave the city and move to a house in the countryside, near a village where Millie has found work, to see if the change will benefit them and strengthen their relationship. But not before, at a farewell party thrown by friends, Millie proposes to Tim in front of everyone, and he hesitates in his answer, much to her embarrassment, disappointment, and sadness.

Once settled into their new home, Tim and Millie explore the surrounding woods, which, as anyone who watches horror movies knows, isn't a good idea. Especially since, as they learned from a neighbor who is also Millie's colleague, the couple who previously occupied the house disappeared without a trace in the woods. They are then caught in a storm and fall into a cave, from which they can escape, but where they decide to stay until the storm passes. In the cave, they discover some strange objects (they later learn that a New Age cult and its church once existed there, destroyed when the hole opened and swallowed it), and Tim drinks water from a puddle formed by the rain.

[See an interview with the director:]

The next day, Tim and Millie wake up with their legs partially stuck together, but they don't pay it any mind (they don't know, like we do, what happened to another neighbor's dogs at the beginning of the film). From then on, Tim begins to feel strangely dependent on Millie, like a drug addict, and feels so bad when she's not around that he begins to have uncontrollable panic attacks. This leads to some embarrassing situations, the worst of which is a spontaneous and intense sexual encounter in the boys' bathroom at her school, capped off by a gag that seems straight out of a softcore porn film, somewhere between comical and awkward.

" Together" then builds to a crescendo of terror, as Michael Shanks transforms the film into a nightmare of marital codependency, taking the romantic concept of the fusion between two lovers to the extreme. The identification between a long-time couple is taken to its ultimate, most literal and terrifying consequences, and the symbiotic relationship between two people who know each other deeply and love each other deeply undergoes a supernatural mutation. But until then, Tim and Millie will endure an ordeal of suffering, and Tim, on a new visit to the cave, discovers what happened to the missing couple and realizes that there is an even more monstrous alternative to what is happening to him and Millie.

[See an interview with Dave Franco and Alison Brie:]

Michael Shanks capitalizes dramatically on what Dave Franco and Alison Brie bring to the characters, their lives and experiences as a couple (the director also revealed that he brought some of his own "dirty laundry" to the film), and to give Tim and Millie's relationship depth, veracity, and emotional context. He manages to use concepts from Greek philosophy in the plot without becoming pretentious, and avoids the graphic body horror effects being either gratuitously sensational or unintentionally comical. On the contrary, the distressing sequence involving duct tape and a small chainsaw reveals a strong sense of dark humor, leaving the essentials to our imagination.

[Watch a sequence from the film:]

If there's one criticism we can make of Together , it's that the "big reveal" and explanations, in the film's final act, are handled a bit too quickly, in parallel sequences in the cave and at the couple's neighbor's house. But even so, Michael Shanks leaves no stone unturned in this film, which gives a new and sinister meaning to the expression "better half"; and which guarantees that, after watching it, we'll never hear the Spice Girls' song "2 Become 1" the same way again.