Together | Directed by Dave Franco // Starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco
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Summary (Spoiler-free): Together starts as a quirky romantic drama about a couple trying to rekindle their spark during a secluded weekend getaway. But what begins with therapy games and trust falls quickly descends into something far stranger. As emotional baggage turns physical in the most literal sense, Together becomes a surreal, body-horror-laced exploration of codependence, identity, and the thin line between love and obsession.
I love a good body horror movie. They are usually grotesque, sure, but also weirdly cathartic. The best body horror doesn’t just make you wince; it makes you feel something. The Fly did it. Possessor did it. Titane did it with a damn car. And now Together joins that beautifully disgusting lineage.
If I had to describe Michael Shanks’ Together in a couple words, they would be “cute and disgusting.” And I mean that in the highest, most complimentary sense. Here’s a film that dares to turn the raw emotional sludge of a long-term relationship into something literal, tactile, and often very, very gross. It’s Cronenberg meets Cassavetes via a bathroom quickie... and yes, that scene is exactly as intimate and as horrifying as you might imagine.
Together stars real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as Millie and Tim, a couple staring down the barrel of late-stage cohabitation malaise. She’s a teacher searching for roots and stability; he’s a floundering musician still mourning the recent death of his parents. Their connection feels familiar in its push-pull rhythms, love and resentment playing footsie under the dinner table. If the opening third of the movie plays like a slightly heightened relationship dramedy, that all changes when a hike through their new rural neighborhood leads them to a mysterious sinkhole. Tim drinks the water. Bad idea.
What follows is a spiral into full-blown body horror. Their codependency, already tense and unresolved, becomes a literal magnetism: they’re pulled toward each other against their will, fusing, stretching, melding. Their bodies ache to be as close as their emotional states won’t allow. It's funny. It’s grotesque. It’s surprisingly moving. The metaphors are not subtle, but they work because the filmmaking leans into the absurdity instead of running from it.
Brie and Franco’s chemistry is electric, and it needs to be. There’s a version of this film that doesn’t work at all if the leads aren’t this comfortable with each other or this willing to look uncomfortable. Watching them go from eye-rolls and passive-aggressive jabs to squirmy, skin-crawling intimacy is unsettling in all the right ways. They make the metaphor sing.
Shanks, in his debut, proves himself a clever genre conductor. The scares land, the comedy bites, and the practical effects are gooey and inventive. But what impressed me most was the control of tone. This could easily have tipped into parody or collapsed under its own gross-out gimmicks. Instead, it threads the needle between horror, comedy, and something almost... tragic. There's an undercurrent of mourning here, of lives not lived, of people outgrowing each other, of what happens when the thing that once made you whole starts to rot from the inside.
There’s a mid-movie set piece involving sex, of course... how could there not be? And I’ll just say this: it’s played for laughs, for screams, and, most brilliantly, for character. That scene, and several others like it, got audible reactions in my theater, and for good reason. It’s not just gross; it’s cathartic. The horror becomes the vessel for emotional release in a way that’s deeply satisfying, even when you’re watching through your fingers.
Brie and Franco sell this all with unflinching commitment. You can feel the resentment simmering under their banter, the desperation hidden in their attempts to "fix" things. When Franco’s character, Tim, laments that he can “never be free” of Millie, it lands not just as a horror beat, but as an emotional gut punch, because haven’t we all, at some point, stayed in something longer than we should have? Together asks: what if the thing keeping you close to someone wasn’t love or habit, but something dark, sticky, and inescapable? And what if breaking free meant tearing yourself apart... literally?
Is Together a perfect movie? No. The third act gets a little too tidy, and some of the emotional threads feel intentionally clipped in service of one last genre punchline. And the movie is maybe the least subtle I've seen this year in terms of message. But does it matter? Not really. Because this is a film that knows exactly what it wants to do, and does it with flair, guts (literally), and a healthy dose of romantic nihilism.
In an era where so many horror-comedies either flail for tone or drown in ironic detachment, Together stands out by embracing the mess. It’s about the mess. The mess of being in love, of staying in love, of trying to pull apart two lives that have been hopelessly entangled.
Together is a weird little gem of a movie, messy, bold, funny, and deeply uncomfortable in all the right ways. It knows exactly what it is and leans into its bonkers premise with style and purpose. If you’re squeamish, skip it. But if, like me, you think love should hurt a little (and maybe ooze), then this is one to seek out. It’s a bad date movie, a great couple’s therapy companion, and one of the weirdest, funniest, most heartfelt horror flicks of the year.
Bring a partner to see it. Actually, maybe don’t.
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