Relationships are a battle of finding where you end when where your partner begins. Between all of the hobbies, interests, passions, memories, trauma and emotions, both partners bring something to the table in a relationship, and over time it can be easy for those things to enmesh themselves with one another and lose yourself in your partner.
Few films understand this or illustrate quite as well as Michael Shanks’ feature debut, Together.
The film finds young couple Mille (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) preparing for a much-needed move to the countryside. Their relationship has been spinning its wheels, and with that, things have become more and more difficult for them to be happy as both individuals and as a couple.
Millie has taken a job as a teacher in rural Oregon while Tim has struggled to get his once-promising music career off the ground and with the move, that dream is seeming to slip further away.
Despite the recommendations from friends that they split and an awkward marriage proposal that doesn’t go as planned, Millie and Tim find themselves in their new home starting fresh.
Early on, Tim’s encounters with home improvement and finding a Rat King nest of rats stirs up trauma in his past – finding his parents dead and dying in their room as a child. It’s the kind of trauma that rears its head every once in a while, yet becoming stronger in this new home.
Feeling the need to improve his relationship with Millie and feeling the pressure from another teacher at Millie’s school, Jamie – played by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Charles Manson, Damon Herriman – who seems more than willing to connect with her, Tim decides to take the two of them on an afternoon hike through the nearby woods. That hike takes a turn for the worse when Tim and Millie find themselves in a torrential downpour and falling into a cave.
What that cave is, what is inside of it and how it will change their lives forever is the real treat of Together, and it’s a journey best-left unspoiled, but it is one of the most crowd-pleasing thrill rides of the entire first half of this year’s SXSW 2025 Film & TV Festival.
After emerging from the cave, Together becomes an insane blend of body horror which takes inspiration from some of a wide range of influences. At one time, the film is akin to John Carpenter’s The Thing, while its tone oscillates between Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead 2013 and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2. And all of this is wrapped up in a package that feels heavily inspired by romantic comedies like The Break-Up.
But even with all of its sick, twisted, body horror influences, at its core, Together is a love story.
At its core it’s a film about finding the balance in love and defining what a healthy relationship looks like. Where is the line between having your own life and having a life that is so wrapped up in each other that it borders on dependency?
Shanks’ script takes this and runs with it full-force delivering a film that will have you squirming and screaming on moment and laughing raucously the next. Few films are able to handle the tonal balance of a horror/comedy, but Together has two hands on the wheel the entire time, driving head-first into insanity.
But the film’s core question is posed to the audience about halfway through the film during an intense, late-night encounter between Millie and Tim as they find themselves being pulled towards one another.
The sequence, arguably the biggest, most important sequence in the film both in terms of effort but also in thematic resonance, sees Millie’s body contorting in bone-crunching, revolting ways in order to draw closer to Tim. The contortion work in the scene is jaw-dropping and Franco’s reaction to it mirrors the audience’s reaction to perfection: utter disbelief, shock and horror.
While the performances from the film’s cast are exciting on their own, the combination of the visuals and sound design are what steal the show here. Every sound reverberates through your skin, causing a quaking of the bones and a shiver down the spine.
Body horror has been seeing a bit of a resurgence in the last few years, particularly in the wake of real-world consequences around bodily autonomy, and Together stands right up there with among the best of them.
RATING: B+
Brandon Toks Movies 
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