Alison Brie and Dave Franco are a couple in real life and in excitable quarters this fact alone earns Together extra kudos. It’s a talking point, but the Brie/Franco connection doesn’t otherwise make any difference to this movie. They are fine, separately and together, as people whose too-close relationship shifts from the figurative to the literal in a dire and grisly way.
We know this before it happens because a pre-credits sequence has told us so, in a tone-setting mini-drama in which two separate dogs have wound up fused together in a gruesomely icky way. Which is what’s coming down the pipe for Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) once they head out into the countryside in a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship.
Millie and Tim are close in the sense that they dress alike and like the same stuff, but they no longer have sex. She wants to get physical with him but he is unable to come up with the goods. Possibly something to do with his music career having stalled. Possibly they have just arrived in the sparkless zone of cuddles and cocoa.
Either way, this move out of the city is an attempt to start afresh. Unfortunately their new home turns out to be a Movie Horror House, lots of wood, leaded windows, ceiling roses etc. There they first find a portent: a rats’ nest in the ceiling containing rodents fused together by the tail – look away – and shortly afterwards fall into a hole in the ground in the woods, full of weird ecclesiastical stuff, where they drink from a pool of brackish water.
For Millie and Tim this is the magical well or poison apple of fairy tale and the point at which the film decisively shifts in tone. The following morning, having slept clinging to each other uncomfortably on twigs and leaves like the Babes in the Wood, their legs have slightly stuck together, enough to cause lesions when they pull them apart.
Things get worse from here, and Together shifts permanently out of the domestic and into the supernatural as Millie and Tim find that every time they make physical contact, it becomes almost impossible to – literally – tear themselves apart.
A metaphor for co-dependency coupled to a storyline about a relationship falling apart, those are strange bedfellows. However, Michael Shanks, making his feature debut as writer and director, turns out to be very good at investing the normal with a sinister edge. Tightly edited, visually disquieting montages of everyday stuff with added weirded-out sound. Even before the trouble starts, things are feeling a bit hairy – he manages to make a shower head seem a bit malevolent.
Married couples in movies is a dubious offer. On the upside the budget for the intimacy co-ordinator should be minimal. But for every John Krasinski and Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place there’s Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith. Good and bad respectively. Franco and Brie do OK. He’s good, she’s better, especially when maximum thespian dramatics are required and Brie gets a chance to show what she can do. Also worth mentioning is Damon Herriman as Millie’s teacher colleague, Jamie. The only other really significant character in this, Jamie is too affable by half, it seems. Up to no good? Fancies Millie? Something more ominous? Nicely played by Herriman.
Shanks confidently takes his film from cool to hot. From the metrosexual couple’s relationship woe through the gorey phase – out come the power tools – and on to full-on body-horror. Things ends closer to a 1950s creature feature than you might expect, but the transitions are handled well.
It becomes the sort of film where someone says, “There’s only one way to end this,” before the mad crescendo. But there’s also a jaunty comedy tone here and there, which adds a welcome respite, and early on Shanks sets up a groanworthy dad joke paying off with a well known song playing out over the end credits. Worth hanging on for. It’s not Lionel Richie’s Stuck On You.
Together – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
