Film
Michael Shanks’s supernatural relationship drama Together is less body horror than an angsty study of co-dependency. By Anthony Carew.
Together’s unconscious coupling
“If we don’t split now, it’ll be harder later,” says Millie (Alison Brie), early in the film Together to her long-term partner, Tim (Dave Franco). She’s talking about the future of their relationship, at a crossroads after she accepted a teaching job in a rural area that would take Tim away from the downtown music scene that has been at the centre of his life and his stalling career.
It’s supposed to be an emotional moment, but given the premise of the film – a couple begin to physically fuse together through a supernatural force – it scans more like a winking joke, almost a little too cute. Writer-director Michael Shanks likes the line enough that he brings it back in the third act, when they’ve begun to merge and the splitting is more literal.
Together is being sold as a body-horror movie, its posters splashed with an eye-catching image of Brie and Franco joined at the lips. But it’s not really. Even in an era of “elevated” horror, in which the once-underestimated genre is used as a social commentary vehicle and prestige product, it’s striking how uninterested Together is in creating a real sense of terror or menace.
Instead it’s a relationship drama, touching on horror only as it relates to its central fear: co-dependency. Together can seem unsure or uninspired when it’s going through the motions of explaining away its central premise – yadda yadda a mystical cave, something something cult members – but it has such a strong understanding of human behaviour and relationship dynamics that, for viewers not too beholden to genre, it may not matter.
There’s added resonance in the fact that its stars are a real-life couple, together (as it were) for 13 years, married for eight. Franco and Brie came on board as stars and producers when they read Shanks’s script. This fact would normally be barely more than a backstory footnote but now may play the part of key evidence in a trial.
In May, the principal Together players (writer-director, stars, producers, agents, studio) were sued for copyright infringement by writer Patrick Henry Phelan, who claimed plagiarism of an idea. The studio’s public statement in reply was that this is effectively a nuisance lawsuit “doing nothing more than drumming up 15 minutes of fame for a failed project”, a little-seen 2023 movie titled Better Half.
Shanks’s response was more emotional, citing how much Together is drawn from his own long-term relationship. “To be accused of stealing this story,” the filmmaker said, “one so deeply based on my own lived experience, one I’ve developed over the course of several years, is devastating.”
The 34-year-old was born in New Zealand and has long been based in Australia (his youthful What We Do in the Shadows-inspired 2016 web series, The Wizards of Aus, makes much of its Footscray setting). Initial development for Together’s screenplay came through Screen Australia funding. Though nominally set in a non-specific America – a vague sense of California or Oregon, I suppose – the film was shot in Victoria with a local crew, with notable credits for cinematographer Germain McMicking and composer Cornel Wilczek.
Many scenes make use of the picturesque Dandenong Ranges just outside Melbourne. While Australian viewers are conditioned to seeing familiar landscapes fill in for another country, there are moments where it seems sad to see, for example, a classic primary school with its rows of “bubblers” borrowed for a generic America.
Together’s lack of setting, apart from vague allusions to living in urban or rural spaces, isn’t entirely detrimental, given that it largely functions on a symbolic level. It introduces us to Millie and Tim, a long-term couple with plenty of love but just as many problems to negotiate. A farewell party finds them leaving behind the city and friends that defined their cool 20s, moving both out of town and into a new phase of their relationship.
Their relocation creates a natural sense of isolation: they spend more time together and rely on each other more. It also marks a shift in which the role of the person “sacrificing” within the partnership changes. The couple have long navigated towards Tim’s creative pursuits and music career, but here, as Millie prioritises her own career, he has to change, and both of them are aware that he may resent it.
Moving to an old house in the country is a time-honoured horror trope, and there’s not much more plot beyond that set-up. We get a couple of scenes at Millie’s new job, but only really to introduce us to Together’s only other notable character, the pretty suss Jamie (Damon Herriman, returning to creepy typecasting after a brief playing-a-nice-guy break for The Bikeriders), who is a guide to both the local streets and local lore.
Together is less about narrative than exploring its central relationship, a conceit given extra resonance by Brie and Franco’s real-life status. A hiking trip and a chance encounter with a mystical cave provide the impetus for its body-horror brief, but even that trip is about further entrenching us in the dynamic between its two lead characters.
It shows how moments of conflict, failures or freak-outs can quickly be turned into in-jokes, past negatives repurposed as bonding mechanisms. Characters call each other out on their behaviour, apologies are made. There are discussions about past trauma that feel more like couples therapy than horror-movie tropes about repressed memory made manifest as current pain.
Questions are raised about whether Tim is really a good guy, as Millie tells her friends, but this isn’t a Midsommar-style grand cosmic reckoning for shitty boyfriend behaviour. In the cinematic canon of dysfunctional relationships, the pair seem pretty functional.
Their gradual fusion of flesh is initially fought. This creates some wonky moments where the actors have to mime against a magnetic force drawing them together. It also makes for the movie’s gnarliest moments: a fusion of genitalia that sneaks in a panicky POV shot and an at-home operation by way of Chekhov’s power saw. An encounter with a monster that recalls the final reel of The Substance presents a nightmare vision of the mutant future that might await them.
Yet, ultimately, Together can’t fight its own metaphor, nor the relationships that its writer-director and two stars are drawing inspiration from. It becomes a film in which true commitment isn’t about fighting for independence so much as steering harmoniously into co-dependence, leading to a climactic scene that offers a new perspective on the Spice Girls’ power-ballad “2 Become 1”.
If Together is trading on the fears of co-dependency, or of changing for someone else, it ultimately suggests these are the inevitable, perhaps even positive, results of a long-term partnership. Viewers can decide individually whether that idea is its own horror.
Together is screening in cinemas nationally.
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