There’s a moment early in Together when Millie (Alison Brie) watches Tim (Dave Franco) fumble a toast at their farewell party. It’s awkward, but the pain on her face reveals more than a thousand arguments could — this is a woman who has been waiting years for her partner to meet her halfway, and she’s tired of waiting. That raw, unspoken tension becomes the foundation of Michael Shanks’ debut feature, a film that blends domestic drama and supernatural horror in a way that feels both disturbingly intimate and narratively ambitious.
Premise & Story
The film begins with the couple’s move from the city to a remote rural home, an attempt to start afresh after years of quiet dissatisfaction. But an accidental fall into a hidden cave — and a drink from a strange underground spring — triggers an impossible transformation: their bodies begin to physically fuse together. Skin, bone, and muscle knit in grotesque ways, causing excruciating pain whenever they try to separate.
While the setup invites comparisons to Cronenbergian body horror, Together resists becoming a gore spectacle. Instead, Shanks uses the physical merging as a metaphor for emotional entrapment, turning the “can’t live with you, can’t live without you” cliché into a visceral, almost suffocating reality.
Performances — The Beating Heart of the Film
If Together works — and it often does — it’s because of Brie and Franco’s commitment to inhabiting their characters with emotional specificity.
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Alison Brie’s Millie is a revelation here. She plays her as a pragmatic, quietly resilient woman who has been carrying the relationship’s weight for far too long. Her performance thrives in the silences — the way her eyes glaze over when Tim makes another half-hearted promise, the subtle tightening of her jaw in moments of frustration. In the later horror sequences, she’s equally commanding, navigating both the physical strain of prosthetics and the psychological toll of Millie’s predicament.
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Dave Franco’s Tim is frustrating, likable, and heartbreakingly human — often all in the same scene. He leans into Tim’s immaturity without turning him into a caricature. There’s a vulnerability beneath his evasiveness, especially in moments when his voice cracks with unspoken fear. In one standout sequence, as the couple tries and fails to pull themselves apart, Franco’s panic feels so unvarnished that it’s genuinely unsettling.
The real magic lies in their shared history, which the actors convey effortlessly. As a real-life couple, Brie and Franco understand the rhythms of intimacy — the inside jokes, the casual touches, the deep sighs of disappointment — and bring that authenticity to screen. That chemistry makes their on-screen disintegration all the more affecting.
Direction, Visuals & Tone
Shanks approaches the material with surprising restraint. While the concept is absurd on paper, his direction grounds it in emotional truth. The cinematography alternates between warm, golden tones during fleeting moments of tenderness and cold, desaturated palettes during their descent into horror.
A cave sequence lit by nothing but a flickering fire is a visual highlight — Franco’s face half-hidden in dancing shadows, Brie’s silhouette trembling in the background, the air thick with both fear and resignation. The practical effects, particularly in depicting the bodily fusion, are tactile and queasy without tipping into gratuitous gore.
The sound design deserves special mention. From the subtle wet noises of skin sticking to the sharp rip of separation attempts, every auditory detail is designed to unsettle. The score pulses with quiet dread, refusing to overplay the horror but never letting the audience relax.
Narrative Strengths and Weaknesses
Where Together excels is in marrying its metaphor to its characters’ emotional truth. This is not horror for horror’s sake — it’s about what happens when love becomes a trap, when two people mistake endurance for commitment.
However, not all subplots land. Hints of a folk-horror element involving a local cult add atmosphere but remain frustratingly underexplored. The pacing occasionally sags in the midsection, stretching certain confrontations longer than needed. And the climax, while visually arresting, veers so far into surreal chaos that it risks undermining the grounded emotional work laid earlier.
Verdict
Messy but memorable, Together is the kind of film that dares to be different — an intimate, unsettling fusion of relationship drama and supernatural horror. It’s powered by two outstanding central performances that elevate its already intriguing premise. Michael Shanks emerges as a bold new voice in genre filmmaking, one unafraid to make audiences uncomfortable both emotionally and physically.
For those willing to embrace its strangeness, Together offers something rare: a horror film that horrifies not with monsters in the dark, but with the creeping realization that sometimes the scariest thing is being bound to the wrong person — forever.
CINEMA SPICE RATING: ★★★½ (3.5/ 5)
