Released: 31st July
Seen: 2nd November
Last year, the biggest surprise in cinema was the reaction to a little film called The Substance. Positive critiques by pretty much anyone who saw it, a massive box office hit and perhaps most surprisingly of all, it received nominations in major categories at the Oscars (and, in my view, should’ve at least won Best Actress). All this for a weird body horror film about how Hollywood treats women past a certain age, that kind of film normally would be relegated to the horror superfans circuit because Body Horror in particular is one of the more difficult sub-genres of horror for people to really get into. Maybe, if we’re lucky, The Substance opened up a floodgate to let mainstream Hollywood actors take a crack at weird body horror films, and if Together is any indication, that feels like a real possibility.
Together follows Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie), a young couple who have decided to make the leap to move out to the countryside, where a teaching job is ready for Millie. Sure, this might make Tim’s dream of being in a band a little harder to achieve, but together they should be able to make it… at least that’s what they thought before they moved. Something about that large change in their lives has started to drive a wedge between them that could potentially break them up. One day, after going hiking and happening upon an odd underground cavern, Tim and Millie slowly start finding it harder and harder to be apart from each other. Not harder in a “Oh, I actually love you so much” kind of way, but harder as in they’re literally sticking together and their bones physically ache and try to push them together until they become one person.
Together really is a film that fires on all cylinders and plays with every tool that it has access to as much as possible. At its core, the film is a domestic drama, showing the ups and downs of a young relationship in the modern world, trying to deal with the reality of being two very different people with very different goals in life. It’s Marriage Story with a little bit of fleshy-fusion thrown in for good measure. You really get the sense that this couple wants to make this work out, that their fights and issues can be overcome, but they also don’t want to be so completely co-dependent that they become one person.
The scenes where our main characters try to resist the fusing of their bodies are some of the most viscerally unsettling scenes in the entire film, and are presented absolutely perfectly on both a visual and an aural level. The sound of their bones bending and cracking will absolutely stick with you. You can feel the pain that they’re experiencing every single time the weirdness overtakes them and they have to fight so hard not to go through with the process that this whole film revolves around. One scene that takes place with them literally fighting their own bones while they are trying to get them down a hallway might be one of the wildest and weirdest scenes of the year. It’s shockingly well done and elevates the whole concept to a new level.
It also really doesn’t hurt that there’s the meta level of this couple being played by a real-life married couple, watching them fight and make up, knowing that this probably isn’t that far off what they do in real life, makes things feel more intense. It also clearly helped them in the more truly extreme scenes, where a ton of trust would be needed, and you can tell that Dave and Alison trust each other on a level that everyone else could only wish for. In a weird parasocial way, you almost feel like you’re getting an insight into them as a real couple, even though they’re playing characters and you really hope that they aren’t like this in real life… I assume they aren’t. I can’t be sure if Allison Brie would be down to cut into Dave’s arm with a power saw, but I choose to assume she’d have some issues with that.
What holds Together back is that it feels the need to keep joking around at the most serious moments, moments that really do not require them to be jokey. I get that they’re playing to the strengths of the leads, Dave and Alison both have some pretty impressive comedy chops, so the jokes they throw out land pretty well, but it also kind of kills the tension when, in the middle of a very serious and powerful scene, they’re throwing out little one-liners. You can almost imagine how much more intense some of these scenes could be if they didn’t feel the need to elbow the audience in the ribs while cracking their little jokes all the time.
Together is a genuinely great little body horror film that plays around with domestic drama tropes right up until it decides it’s bored with that and wants to just fuck with the audience’s senses. It’s charming, dark, weird and will have your teeth on edge with how much it’s willing to put the main characters through. With a pair of truly fascinating performances carrying it through even its low points, Together is the kind of film that knows its strengths and plays to them better than a lot of other films in the same genre. More celebrity body horror, please. We cannot have too much of this wild, fun little genre.
Movie Meister Reviews 