TOGETHER Review: Love Will Shunt Us Together
This deeply romantic body horror slithers under your skin.
Body horror has been enjoying a renaissance, and that was even before Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance nabbed the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the 97th Academy Awards and earned star Demi Moore a nomination for Best Actress. When Moore receives her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Elisabeth Sparkle blobs will inevitably appear as fan tributes, an undeniable declaration that grotesque glamor has become mainstream. So for writer/director Michael Shanks, who has been working for the better part of six years to bring his debut feature Together to life, there’s never been a better time to dare to ask the question: What happens when your relationship literally devours you?
Alison Brie and Dave Franco — a real-life couple who effortlessly fall into their roles — star as Millie and Tim, a couple in their 30s who have never really experienced adulthood without the other in their life. Millie has recently accepted a job as a grade-school teacher in a small, woodsy town, forcing her musician boyfriend to decide if now is when he finally graduates out of this stage of arrested development or enters a new one full of resentment. Millie and Tim clearly love one another, but they’re going through a bit of a rough patch and are hoping for a fresh start in their picturesque new home, much larger than anything they could have ever afforded if they had stayed in the big city. But their new home harbors a horror more unfathomable than the witnessed tragedy Tim has been letting consume him for years.
After falling into a nightmare grotto with pews embedded into the walls and drinking from a bizarre pool of water, the couple is plagued by their bodies’ uncontrollable urge to fuse together into a single unit, as if the shunting in Society started involuntarily happening. As Millie and Tim desperately try to keep their distance, the infection thrusts their bodies and minds into a stretching, squelching frenzy.
Franco is best known by the general public for his work in comedy films, but he’s a diehard horror fan who seems to use his big-budget studio checks to fund experimental genre work like his directorial debut,