With co-dependency as its anchor metaphor, Together is a body horror movie asking the question how intimate you’d ever want to be with your beloved? It’s a relationship drama about two people that should probably break up and move on but are clinging to some sense that they need to stay. Real-life married couple Dave Franco (The Disaster Artist) and Alison Brie (Horse Girl) play pretend couple Tim and Millie who relocate to the small-town countryside and come across a mysterious sinkhole belonging to an abandoned New Agey church, as one does. After Tim, in his desperation, drinks the water out of a pit that looks like it was designed by H.R. Giger, his body and mind are hijacked with the compulsion to be as close as possible with his long-time girlfriend. Now the two of them are fighting strange impulses, like swallowing one another’s hair, or trying to physically meld their bodies together. Can they learn more about their predicament and the history of this symbiosis before they are forced together forever?

Considering its premise, there is plenty of potential here for grandly gross body horror. There are certainly some squirm-worthy and disgusting moments of vivid imagery that could induce nightmares. I’m not even talking about the direct body horror moments. Seeing a man swallowing a majority of your ponytail in his sleep might make you gag like it did me. Things get more wild after an hour and stay that way to the end, as the couple has to thwart their bodies from literally fusing together. The sticky skin-to-skin, or eyeball-to-eyeball sequences are dreadfully unnerving, but the imagery of them literally being dragged by invisible forces across the ground to one another like literal magnets is less horrifying and more absurdly ridiculous. That’s the rub. There’s some terrific body horror grotesquery here, and writer/director Michael Shanks has a sneaky way with dread, building things to a monumental point and then cutting away. However, some of the other aspects of this curse come across as far goofier, like the aforementioned being dragged across the floor. For some it might come across as terrifying, the whole supernatural exaggeration of being out of control of your own body, but it reminded me of Tenet where it looked like characters were just rolling around on the ground in a supremely silly way when it was supposed to be “backwards time.” There are also some middling jump scares relating to Tim’s trauma with his parents that, I guess, is the explanation for why he has intimacy problems. Still, if you’re coming to Together for the outlandishly gross potential of its premise, there may be enough to sate your curiosity for macabre oddities.

Together is more a movie about a couple who should retire. There’s far more about the struggles and pains of this relationship than weird body horror. She wants to get married, he doesn’t. She wanted to move for a new job, and he did not. She wants to have regular sex, he hasn’t wanted to for months for unspecified reasons (unresolved childhood traumas?). The relationship is very one-sided and unlike 2019’s Midsommar, which was about a poor woman realizing it was time to kick her no-good boyfriend to the curb, or burn him alive via cult intervention, this movie is more about Millie wearing down Tim’s defenses. He’s connecting with her again but it’s through this metaphysical compulsion that he can’t fully explain. He’s expressing real physical interest but he’s still finding ways to reject her, which just drives her crazier. One minute they’re trying to resolve their intimacy issues, and the next they’re working together to slice their arms apart. There are some memorable discomforts, like having to physically dislodge after some vigorous yet impulsive bathroom stall sex. That sequence made me uncomfortable for several reasons. The film’s shock value and tone flirts with darker humor without committing. The final shot of the movie is also a bit silly, and while it achieves the articulation of the movie’s main theme, the concluding imagery is more like, “Oh, well, okay then.” It might even produce a few guffaws. It’s not quite the lasting image I think the filmmakers wanted to go out on. It made me think of Kevin Smith’s man-becomes-walrus horror film, Tusk, where it ends and you go, “Oh… well, they did it, all right.” Some things are better in theory than finally visualized where they come across as anticlimactic.

That’s the other thing with Together, it’s practically bludgeoning you with its obvious theme, having every other line relate back to codependency. Multiple times you will hear, “It would be better to separate now. It will just be harder the longer we wait.” Can you get how this will be applied in multiple contexts? These are characters that feel stuck. Get it? Franco and Brie have an easy-going chemistry and an innate ability to find the darker humor amidst all the body horror splicing. I might argue their chemistry is too good considering they’re supposed to be a couple that shouldn’t really stay together and have passed their relationship expiration date. I don’t think you should want them to stay together considering this relationship is killing the both of them, now very literally. I was surprised there wasn’t more combustion to how this complicates their interactions and mobility. If this is a relationship that has had its rocky points and toxicity, you would think something this unnatural and against their autonomy would produce some friction (no pun intended). I suppose you could examine the entire movie as an analysis of how easily people will subsume themselves in order to stay in something even they would admit isn’t healthy. I’m not going to pretend The Substance was subtle either, but that movie was more fable and mixing in its over-the-top elements with verve, rather than fitting them into a relationship dirge.

Right before its nationwide theatrical release, Together was accused of plagiarism by another filmmaker who approached Franco and Brie with a similar concept in 2020. Shanks has defended his film by saying he registered his first draft back in 2019, and the producers of Together, including Franco and Brie, have dismissed the claim. I haven’t read the competing script, nor do I pretend to be an insider on this matter, but it’s easy for me to see how this concept could have been independently generated by dozens of screenwriters and aspiring body horror gurus. It’s taking its theme and making it quite literal, forcing the challenged couple who shouldn’t be together to literally, physically, irrevocably be together. It’s all pretty straightforward, which makes Together a workable but limited body horror experiment. I liked it, as much as one can like a movie where characters have to forcibly unstuck their genitals, but I found myself wanting a little more from Together. The added Tim back-story spooks feel out of place, the ongoing mystery of what happened to a previous backpacking couple is over represented, and the theme is so obvious at every turn that the metaphor is in danger of being stripped bare. Its concept is undeniable, and the body horror imagery can be aces, but the development and execution could have been a little more, well, together.

Nate’s Grade: B-