What is it about romantic strife that makes it so well matched with genre cinema? Stuck with a casually unsympathetic significant other? Let’s watch it all unravel amid the rituals of a murderous cult (“Midsommar”). Seeking true love? Then you’re officially a part of the dating meat market (“Fresh”). Think you’ve got something real going with that dreamboat after only a few weeks? Just make sure he isn’t one of those no-strings-attached situationship dudes (“Oh, Hi!”).
No matter how you spin it, twosomes are perennially daunting. Damned if you’re at the beginning of a promising road with someone; damned if you’re years into something secure. If it isn’t the dread towards the unknown, then it is the fear of losing the sure thing. In the meticulously calibrated and sharply perceptive “Together,” a piercing codependency allegory with plenty of purposeful body-horror set pieces and a wicked sense of humor, debuting feature filmmaker Michael Shanks grasps what makes love so thoroughly frightening (and thus, so thoroughly fit for horror) on a deep level. The primary question on this movie’s mind goes something like this: What if you’re safely settled into the relationship that you always wanted, but you’re somehow growing apart and alone?
Real-life couple (and producers) Dave Franco and Alison Brie bring a stunning amount of lived-in authenticity and tension to Tim and Millie, a couple at that crossroads after a years-long togetherness. Unless they figure out how to unite in the truest way possible, they run the risk of losing one another. They start with a change of location. She’s scored a hard-to-come-by new job as a school teacher in the country, and he’s that thirty-something musician still waiting for his big break while his significant other supports his dreams. So they are leaving it all behind for a life in the sticks.
Shanks is such an efficient character builder on the page that we immediately get the sense of these two, especially Tim. We wonder early on whether he might have reached a point where he should rethink things. Maybe he isn’t just one killer gig away from bigger things. Maybe he should just cut his losses and quit. Still, Tim and Millie are hopeful that their upcoming move will help them save some stuff: some money, some sanity, and maybe even them as a couple. Plus, “it’s not a real goodbye,” the two insists in a white lie every person moving from the city to the country must tell themselves in order to take the plunge. Except, with Tim lacking a driver’s license, and relying on a busy Millie to drive him to the train station, things aren’t as simple as they seem. Further complicating the matters is Tim’s hesitation and delayed “Yes” when Millie pops the question at the party in front of everyone. Does he still want this? The move, the commitment, a future together?
A creepy discovery nesting in the house’s ceiling and the appearance of a “Chekhov’s Gun” in the form of a reciprocating saw later, a freak incident in the early days of the move propels the couple’s problems in freakish ways. On a nearby hike (and on the heels of a recent-ish news of a missing couple who have hiked in the area), Tim and Millie fall to an inground cave with a design reminiscent of “Alien,” and decide to take shelter there overnight due to bad weather. But mysterious things start happening after the accident, events that Shanks studiously dials up in intensity. For starters, Tim experiences frequent episodes that look like self-destructive seizures. Bad for his joints and bones, but good for their sex life apparently—just wait for one of the most thrilling bathroom stall trysts cinema has given us thus far. And it doesn’t stop there. There is now a pull between the two, something soul-splitting, gooey, sticky, and limb-shattering. But what’s going on?
You will figure it out just in time (the way Shanks has carefully mapped out) and promptly buckle up for two of the year’s most impressively physical performances, with plenty of stylish nods to Cronenbergian pastures as well as John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in well-executed set pieces that feel like an event. Indeed, what Franco and Brie pull off here in bending, twisting, stretching and uniting their bodies, with the help of some truly stunning practical and visual effects, is a fiendishly fun sight to behold. Also noteworthy is Damon Herriman’s performance as Jamie, Millie’s kindly co-worker and the duo’s friendly neighbor who sometimes witnesses more troubles than he should in the couple’s union across smartly written and deeply relatable scenes. Herriman brings an uneasy sense of sweetness and mystique to the role that’s hard to pin down, but easy to revel in.
Due to its twisty nature, “Together” is best not to be spoiled, but experienced instinctively with the same blind faith we tend to put in every worthwhile relationship. And what’s a worthwhile relationship, if not partly the sum of certain defining moments? In Tim and Millie’s relationship, one of those defining moments happen in the aforementioned cave when a severely dehydrated Tim drinks from a seedy well that we all instantly know that he shouldn’t. But at times, that’s exactly the kind of thing you can’t help but do in a committed relationship—it’s wrong in retrospect and yet you did it anyway. It takes real commitment to survive a string of those questionable decisions inside a relationship where you forget where you end and your other half begins. Rest assured, finding out whether an on-screen couple have what it takes has rarely felt this cutting, and, ultimately, this rewarding.
