“We love each other,” Millie (Alison Brie) tells her ‘boy partner’ Tim (Dave Franco, in fact Brie’s real-life husband) some way into Michael Shanks’ feature debut Together, “but if we don’t split now it will be much harder later.”
Millie and Tim have been together for ten years, and cannot really remember what life was like before they met – but at the same time, they have entered that stage where they are also forgetting what exactly their togetherness means. They are beyond the age of calling each other ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’, but also not married. The recent death – under highly harrowing circumstances – of Tim’s father has filled them with the urgent sense of an ending, and the trauma of finding his corpse in the marital bed has also devastated Tim’s libido, so that Tim and Millie have entirely stopped having sex together, much to her frustration and his humiliation. School teacher Millie alone knows how to drive, and alone is gainfully employed, while Tim keeps house and still dreams, in his thirties, of becoming a rockstar; she is the breadwinner, while he alone bakes that bread, as the only one able to cook. They have reached a crossroads, unsure whether their differences are irreconcilable, or they complete one another.
Aware that they are reaching a make-or-break moment, Millie takes desperate measures to introduce some much-needed change into their stagnant relationship: she arranges for them to move far from their city friends and apartment to a house out in the bush; and she proposes marriage. These steps serve to amplify both the real problems that Tim and Millie have, and beyond all those, the deep love that they share for each other. Yet a hike into the woods, and a fall into a sunken chapel, will infect both of them with the same supernatural condition that earlier, in the film’s prologue, brought two caged dogs together, The Thing-like, into one grotesque hybrid.
Now ‘sticking together’ may no longer just be a figure of speech for commitment but also a literal reality, as Millie and Tim are magnetically drawn to each other, and find their flesh fusing and their bodies blending whenever they touch each other. So this couple must decide whether to merge fully with their Platonic soulmate and reunite with their ‘other half’, or to sever their ties painfully and permanently. In other words, Shanks is using the idioms of body horror to articulate all the tensions – the attractions and irritations, intimacies and aversions – that must be negotiated in any long-term relationship. This is like Thibault Emin’s Else (2024) without the sense of globally apocalyptic meltdown, like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) without the satire of ageing and celebrity, and it evokes the finale of the Adams/Poser family’s Where The Devil Roams (2023) without the carnivalesque period setting.
Yet the focus here is the squelchy, sometimes sexy dynamics of give and take needed in a devoted union, where love literally hurts, where passion plays out in both its senses, and where separations are executed at the blade of an electric saw. Together may derive its edge from BDSM imagery, its voguishness from trans motifs, and its corrective balance from the equal weight it gives both to hetero- and homosexual relationships and to male and female anatomies – but what holds it all together is the chemistry of the two leads, and the attention paid to their characters’ psychological as well as erotic makeup. The monstrous metaphor of their coming together may be a little heavy-handed, but this hyperbolic romance ultimately works not just because of its participants’ considerable commitment to their parts, but also, as in any successful relationship, thanks to their persistent good sense of humour.
Together is out now in cinemas
