Together
This 'romantic body horror' about a couple who (literally) can't bear to be apart either needed to be a lot scarier, more erotic or just plain less goofy.
It’s strange when a movie completely meets your expectations, and yet leaves you vaguely unsatisfied.
I was quite looking forward to “Together.” It stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco — a real-life married couple, btw — as two people who can’t bear to be apart… literally.
Through some mysterious supernatural-ly stuff that happens, their bodies becomes transfixed with each other, their skin clinging and grabbing and pulling toward one another, as if commanded to merge. A tender kiss turns into a tearing yank, for example.
They’re intertwining, in their flesh if not their souls, as the couple had been tiptoeing the edge of splitting up. Now, they find they literally can’t.
It’s a nifty idea for a movie. There’s a pretty obvious allegory there about codependency, and finding the happy place between being totally independent of each other and glomming on to the point individual identity is lost.
(It’s also similar to one from the 2023 indie movie “Better Half,” which Brie and Franco were allegedly pitched before making this one. A lawsuit is currently pending.)
Written and directed by Michael Shanks in his first feature, the movie just never connected for me. I was expecting it to either be very gory or explicitly erotic, and it’s rather medium-rare-cooked in both regards instead of going for the sear.
There’s one very brief shot that will surely make every dude in the audience wince, but aside from that and a modest trim here and there, it could easily have been rated PG-13.
Honestly, at times I found it rather goofy, particularly in the stages where Brie and Franco are doing contortionist-type twists and flips as this unseen energy pulls them together like an irresistible magnetism, and they have to grab onto stuff like they’re trapped in a hurricane made for two.
It feels like a mix of religious fundamentalist warnings about the evils of sex and modern intellectual concepts of balancing a relationship — “The Exorcist” meets emotional labor.
As the story opens, Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) are moving from their hip life in New York City to a countrified change of venue a couple hours upstate. She has just landed a teaching job in the small town of Frankton, while he has been struggling to get his musical career off the launch pad. In their mid-30s, they’re at that breaking point where they either continue to pursue dreams that probably aren’t going to happen or settle into comfortable compromise.
The implicit tension between them is that Millie is the safe, boring one while Tim is the immature adventure-seeker. In practice it doesn’t exactly play out that way. Tim is reserved and neurotic; Millie is outgoing and confident. It’s a typical gender scenario of her seeking stability and him unwilling to commit because it feels like a trap.
They also haven’t had sex in many months, due in part to some old trauma from his childhood that has been coming back to visit Tim. (I’ll pause here to note my inability to suspend disbelief at the notion anyone would turn down sex with Alison Brie.)
While exploring the woods around their new home, they fall into a strange hole during a storm and are trapped in the cave underneath. There’s a weird painted bell at the mouth and what appears to be the ruins of some structure. They slake their thirst at the pool of water, and wake up the next morning to find the skin of their legs stuck together.
Things go on from there, with Tim acting weirder and weirder, while Millie seems less vulnerable to the initial pull. For support she turns to Jamie (Damon Herriman), an amiable fellow teacher at her school who happens to live nearby. The mystery deepens when they learn another couple recently disappeared in the same area.
Brie displays her innate prowess to create naturally empathetic characters, even though the story is told more from Tim’s perspective. We root for her and want good things to happen — mostly, for her to kick this mopey creep to the curb.
The push-and-pull of relationships can be confusing and trying. “Together” wants to turn this concept into a mushy scareflick, and the result is something that will only go halfway into the darkest, ickiest reaches of the psychological terrain it’s purporting to explore. In love or storytelling, you just have to commit.