Together opens in theaters August 1. This review is based on a screening at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
In an era rife with horror movies hinged on elaborate analogies, Michael Shanks’ Together leans into its inherent shortcomings and makes up for its conceptual simplicity by turbo-charging its most absurd ideas. Stars and real-life couple Alison Brie and James Franco enter the realm of “metaphorror” in the roles of school teacher Millie and out-of-work musician Tim, whose ill-advised attraction to one another – and their inability to lead separate lives – becomes hilariously literal after a move from the big city to a not-as-quaint-as-it-appears small town. It’s there that their codependency goes full Cronenberg, and Together transforms into an absolute blast.
As we learn through a languid introduction, Millie and Tim have been together for years, but still haven’t tied the knot. He has a trauma lurking in his past, which, alongside her dissatisfaction with his arrested development, seem to threaten their domestic bliss, but neither one is willing to do anything about it. Once they’re established in their new hometown, a walk in the woods sends them tumbling down a hole in the ground and into a mysterious cave – the H.R. Giger-esque, apparently cult-affiliated setting of Together’s cold open, in which two rescue dogs drink from a spring in the underground space and emerge, well, rather attached. Of course, one of our mismatched sweethearts takes a swig from the eerie watering hole while they’re down there, and what follows is a carefully crafted fright-fest that more than makes up for the film’s initial slow pacing.
Before long, Millie and Tim’s reliance on one another becomes magnified and visualized in thrilling ways. Their connection becomes a magnetic force, pushing them together in a trance-like state, though rarely are they zoned out at the same time – the couple is rarely in sync, after all – leaving the other to give hilariously stupefied reactions to the strange goings on, usually in the middle of the night.
These bodily contortions soon lead to thuddingly (and knowingly) literal connections when their bodies finally touch, and the physical boundaries between them start to blur in a skillful combination of practical makeup and CGI. It’s amusingly disgusting, and it comes with repeated, tongue-in-cheek lines of dialogue about how Millie and Tim can’t quite split from one another, leading them to consider pills and sharp objects as their only salvation – a bleakly funny gag about dealing with emotional stagnancy. At one point, Franco delivers a surprisingly meaningful line – about how Tim can “never be free” of Millie – that doesn’t so much have a double or hidden meaning as it simply has two meanings that, while separate on the surface, collide into one (not unlike the characters themselves).
Such silly dialogue flourishes make for some of Together’s most enjoyable moments. Franco and Brie have a fun onscreen chemistry, which works not just despite their respective tendencies to over-emphasize, because of it. Each winking double entendre becomes a pronouncement, followed by a wildly inventive mix of gory body-horror and gravity defying action-comedy that’s worth a mid-film applause break. Together is a dumb movie executed smartly, which is all you can ask of midnight genre fare.
