Michael Shanks’ debut feature Together strips romance down to its raw bones and reconstructs it with visceral body horror and piercing emotional insight. Real‑life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play Tim and Millie, partners at a crossroads whose emotional weariness literally fuses them together in startling, grotesque ways.
Earthy and eerie, Together is a love story rewritten as horror, clever, unsettling, and oddly stirring.
Together Movie Plot & Premise
Tim and Millie relocate from a city apartment to a rustic countryside home so Millie can start teaching and Tim can pursue his stalled music dreams. Tension simmers beneath the surface: Tim hesitates at Millie’s engagement proposition (her recent confusion becomes painfully visible), and resentments mount as their intimacy dwindles.
A forest hike ends in falling into a cave; Tim drinks from a strange pool below. Soon, their bodies begin to merge: legs stick, limbs pull, flesh invites friction.
Mechanical forces escalate: seizures, gooey skin bonds, and a pull they can’t escape, bridging the chasm of their inner estrangement and forcing confrontations they’ve long evaded.
Together Movie Cast & Direction
Franco and Brie bring lived authenticity to their roles, their real marriage inseparable from the character connection. Their performances balance affection, frustration, and repulsion with seamless beats of black comedy and emotional rawness.
Damon Herriman as neighbor Jamie adds a quietly unsettling presence in scenes that mix warmth and unease.
Director Shanks fashions a metaphor laid bare, codependency becomes literal. His screenplay nods to myth (Plato’s Symposium) and Cronenberg’s grotesque intimacy, yet passes metaphor without shame, unabashedly literalizing intimacy’s perils.
Together Movie Review: Horror with Heart
This is a horror as the warp of emotional truths. The practical effects, the prosthetic melding, grotesque crawl‑along skin, a jaw‑dropping bathroom‑stall tryst, are deeply unsettling and emotionally symbolic.
Yet, the terror is grounded in recognizable relational pain: fading desire, fear of commitment, identity loss. The acid‑like pull draws Tim and Millie into a grotesque co-dependence that mirrors the cracks of their love.
The film occasionally flags in pacing, the exposition thickens around the middle as mystical origins of the cave and cult-like mythology creep in. The final act introduces an unnecessary cult subplot and even a monster explanation that diminishes some of the earlier ambiguity and thematic power.
Together Movie Verdict: A Love Story That Bites
I’d say Together is not perfect but it succeeds as a gutsy love‑horror hybrid. It’s the kind of movie that makes you squirm, then think, then laugh nervously at what you just witnessed. It’s grotesque yet tender, metaphor made flesh, a marriage story taken to extremes, and the emotional stakes feel as real as the visual ones.
Uniquely grounded horror: Instead of jump scares, it turns relationship anxiety into a literal, grotesque bond.
Real chemistry, sharper tension: Franco and Brie’s lived intimacy elevates every emotional beat.
A voice for adult love stories: Rare to see long-term relationship struggles depicted so viscerally in horror.
If you’ve ever wondered what it really means to merge with someone—body, soul, life—and worried about losing yourself in the process, Together is an audacious cinematic experiment that puts that fear under a microscope… and a spotlight. Not a traditional romance. Not a typical horror. A deeply human horror romance.
Opening Date: Together debuted at Sundance on January 26, 2025, and hits U.S. theaters July 30, 2025, via Neon.
Critical Reception: Touted with a 100% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes (average ~7.9/10) and a Metacritic score of 76, critics and genre fans alike praise its originality and visceral impact.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars — unsettling, inventive, and darkly moving.
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