Together opens in theaters August 1. This assessment relies on a screening on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
In an period rife with horror films hinged on elaborate analogies, Michael Shanks’ Together leans into its inherent shortcomings and makes up for its conceptual simplicity by turbo-charging its most absurd concepts. Stars and real-life couple Alison Brie and James Franco enter the realm of “metaphorror” within the roles of faculty instructor Millie and out-of-work musician Tim, whose ill-advised attraction to at least one one other – and their lack of ability to guide separate lives – turns into hilariously literal after a transfer from the massive metropolis to a not-as-quaint-as-it-appears small city. It’s there that their codependency goes full Cronenberg, and Together transforms into an absolute blast.
As we study by means of a languid introduction, Millie and Tim have been collectively for years, however nonetheless haven’t tied the knot. He has a trauma lurking in his previous, which, alongside her dissatisfaction together with his arrested growth, appear to threaten their home bliss, however neither one is keen to do something about it. Once they’re established of their new hometown, a stroll within the woods sends them tumbling down a gap within the floor and right into a mysterious cave – the H.R. Giger-esque, apparently cult-affiliated setting of Together’s chilly open, by which two rescue canines drink from a spring within the underground house and emerge, properly, somewhat connected. Of course, certainly one of our mismatched sweethearts takes a swig from the eerie watering gap whereas they’re down there, and what follows is a fastidiously crafted fright-fest that greater than makes up for the movie’s preliminary sluggish pacing.
Before lengthy, Millie and Tim’s reliance on each other turns into magnified and visualized in thrilling methods. Their connection turns into a magnetic drive, pushing them collectively in a trance-like state, although not often are they zoned out on the identical time – the couple is never in sync, in spite of everything – leaving the opposite to provide hilariously stupefied reactions to the unusual goings on, often in the midst of the evening.
These bodily contortions quickly result in thuddingly (and knowingly) literal connections when their our bodies lastly contact, and the bodily boundaries between them begin to blur in a skillful mixture of sensible make-up and CGI. It’s amusingly disgusting, and it comes with repeated, tongue-in-cheek strains of dialogue about how Millie and Tim can’t fairly break up from each other, main them to think about tablets and sharp objects as their solely salvation – a bleakly humorous gag about coping with emotional stagnancy. At one level, Franco delivers a surprisingly significant line – about how Tim can “by no means be free” of Millie – that doesn’t a lot have a double or hidden which means because it merely has two meanings that, whereas separate on the floor, collide into one (not in contrast to the characters themselves).
Such foolish dialogue prospers make for a few of Together’s most fulfilling moments. Franco and Brie have a enjoyable onscreen chemistry, which works not simply regardless of their respective tendencies to over-emphasize, due to it. Each winking double entendre turns into a pronouncement, adopted by a wildly creative mixture of gory body-horror and gravity defying action-comedy that’s value a mid-film applause break. Together is a dumb film executed neatly, which is all you’ll be able to ask of midnight style fare.
