If you thought you'd seen everything body horror had to offer, Michael Shanks just entered the chat with Together, a movie so grotesquely brilliant it had the Sundance midnight crowd screaming "Oh shit!" every five minutes. This isn't just horror – it's relationship therapy by way of Cronenberg, starring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie in roles that required them to literally fuse together.
The premise sounds deceptively simple: Tim and Millie move to the countryside to save their relationship. But when they encounter a supernatural force that begins physically merging them, codependency becomes horrifyingly literal. What follows is 90 minutes of the most ingeniously disturbing practical effects work since The Thing, all in service of a surprisingly profound meditation on toxic love.
Franco and Brie's real-life chemistry makes this work on levels it shouldn't. They're playing a couple who love each other but probably shouldn't be together – or maybe they should be literally together? The film refuses to judge, instead presenting both sides of its twisted argument: Is healthy separation necessary for love, or is complete surrender to another person the ultimate freedom?
Shanks' debut is confident as hell, knowing exactly when to break tension with dark humor and when to go for the jugular with genuinely upsetting body horror. There's a sex scene here that will haunt your dreams – let's just say "pulling out" has never been more terrifying. The practical effects by Larry Van Duynhoven, combined with Framestore's CGI, create images that are beautiful and repulsive in equal measure.
Neon snatched this up for $17 million in a bidding war, and they know exactly what they have – the most original horror film in years. Together takes the metaphor of relationships and makes it flesh, asking whether the boundaries between bodies are what keep us apart or what keep us safe. The answer is messier than you'd think.
