Together
Writer/Director: Michael Shanks
Cast: Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Damon Herriman
Together is exactly what you think it is.
That's saying something at a time when mystery and distraction are so prized in movie marketing, when certain film fans are so spoilerphobic that they barely watch trailers. If you've seen one of this film's posters featuring Alison Brie and Dave Franco intertwined, their limbs and lips and eyelashes threatening to weave together into some kind of monstrosity, you basically know what you're in for, and Michael Shanks' film does not hold back in that mission.
It's not a film attempting to hide its narrative intent, which means it's trusting us to be intrigued, buy a ticket, and focus on the execution, not the mission statement. And in execution, Together is quite simply one of the best genre movies of the year, a horror film so tightly focused and so singularly careful with its characterization that the scares hit harder, the laughs come louder, and the themes hum in your head for days after you've seen it.
Millie (Alison Brie) is a schoolteacher who's just landed a job that'll take her outside the city and into a sort of rural retreat mode, and her long-term partner, musician Tim (Dave Franco) is along for the ride. Like a lot of couples who've lived with each for a long time (at least a decade as far as the film tell us), Tim and Millie are dealing with some staleness, and a certain amount of obligation that neither is quite comfortable with. Dave doesn't necessarily want to go to the country, the sex has dried up, and they're both still hanging on because it feels impossible to let go.
That feeling, that they're joined together whether they like it or not, is literalized in a jaw-dropping way when a hike gone wrong sends the couple falling into a mysterious cave, where a dark pool offers drinking water that's also maybe laced with a few drops of cosmic horror. Soon, Millie and Tim are joined together in literal, physical ways, their bodies forcing them to stay close no matter what as some dark force inside each of them threatens to shove them together until they can never separate even for a second.
Again, if you saw even one poster for the movie, you know about its promise to force these two people into an impossible body horror predicament, and Together delivers that in ways both expected and not. Its most potent moments of sheer, squirm-in-your-seat fear come when you realize that these two can barely leave a room they're sharing without breaking out in a cold sweat, and when you see it with a crowd, the sequences when things get unrelentingly graphic will have you groaning at the screen. Shanks' camera does not flinch from this, which means that body horror hounds definitely get what they came to see. On that level alone, the film is a success, but what makes it great is everything else it's doing.
A lot of modern horror is made up of stories which wear their central metaphors on their sleeves. It's not hard to parse what Get Out is really trying to say, or Midsommar, or Sinners. Together is another film that fits quite neatly into that category; it's about codependency, about navigating the toxicity of a relationship that's being held together with paperclips and duct tape, and what happens on the other side of those crises. Franco and Brie, a real-life married couple as well as frequent collaborators in both comedy and horror spaces, may not actually be Tim and Millie but, like just about everyone else, they've certainly met them, or maybe been them at some point in their lives, and they bring that to bear with astonishing verisimilitude.
Together is a high-concept horror film with some truly skin-crawling (literally) visual effects, but it's also almost a chamber piece. There are few side characters, few locations, and most of the important stuff takes place in either that mysterious cave of Millie and Tim's house, secluded in the woods with only one neighbor (Damon Herriman) nearby. For huge swaths of the film it's just this couple, trying to navigate not only this weird new physical condition they have, but what they're supposed to do now that their relationship has hit a wall. Do they cut and run? Do they stick it out? Yes, these are puns in service to the plot of the movie, but they're also key questions Together never stops asking, and Brie and Franco approach them with tenderness, vulnerability, and humor. It's rare to find a film that will make you laugh not just at awkward moments, but at moments so emotionally devastating that they make you think about your ex on the drive home, but this movie pulls it off in the best way.
To say more about the thematic depths this film is willing to plumb, and how far it's willing to go with its premise, would be to diminish Together's impact, but I will say this: I have rarely been so thoroughly entertained and engaged by a horror story that hews so closely to what it says on the tin. It's a story masterfully told, and I can't wait to watch it again to find all the layers I'm sure I missed. The hype is real, and Together is one of 2025's must-see horror movies.
Together is now in theaters.
