Review: ‘Together' fuses love with horror in all too convincing ways
Germain McMicking/Neon
Phrases describing 'Together' you're likely to read include co-dependent, body horror and black comedy.
All accurate as far as they go. But it makes me want to add, ain't there anyone here for love?
The movie stars real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco and boy, is it evident. Everything Millie and Tim, the hapless pair they play, do and say feels authentic, spontaneous and heartfelt. Their easy familiarity, insecurities, the needs they can and can't fulfill for one another, anger, passion and, yes, terror play like they could only come from folks who've been in love for a long time.
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And they seem to be in it for the long haul, if it doesn't kill them.
Alison Brie as Mille, left, and Dave Franco as Tim in 'Together.'
Germain McMicking/Neon
The generously shared intimacy on display makes all the scary and repulsive stuff seem like more than just good horror movie elements; they're metaphors for relationship hurdles, emotional ickiness made flesh.
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'Together': Horror. Starring Dave Franco, Alison Brie and Damon Herriman. Directed by Michael Shanks. (R. 142 minutes.) In theaters Wednesday, July 30.
This feature debut from Australian writer/director Michael Shanks basically takes one idea and wrings it dry: How do we become closer without losing ourselves in one another? (The filmmaker spoke up about a copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding the film last month.) It can be too much at times, but isn't everything about true love? And being so single-minded about his theme enables Shanks to examine most of what can go wrong between partners. Well-deployed humor, throughout the film but especially between this man and woman, helps make it bearable. The best joke is that, despite everything, these two are probably made for each other.
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Alison Brie as Mille, left, and Dave Franco as Tim in "Together."
Ben King/Neon
Together for a decade before moving from the city to the country, where Millie's landed a teaching job, she and Tim know each other well. But doubt lingers about absolute commitment. Tim hesitates too long when Millie proposes in front of all their friends at a going-away party. Her favorite song is the Spice Girls' '2 Become 1' yet she's quick to say, 'If we don't split now, it will be much harder later.'
He's a guitarist who's still pursuing a career that's never really taken off. Tim nonetheless feels he's giving up something big for Millie with the move, while she sees herself as the sacrificing one while he's chased his failed dream. They haven't had sex in months.
Alison Brie as Mille in 'Together.'
Ben King/Neon
Still, a reset might be what they need. Their new house in the woods is roomy and beautiful, a strange pack of fused rats in the rafters notwithstanding, and has lovely hiking trails nearby.
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Losing their way one stormy afternoon, Millie and Tim fall into a pit. There are remains of a Plato-worshipping church and something in the water down there. They wait out the rain overnight and wake up more connected than ever before. Painfully so, but it's nothing compared to the physical and mental torments about to drive them unimaginably closer.
Dave Franco as Tim, left and Alison Brie as Mille in 'Together.'
Germain McMicking/Neon
Brie and Franco's interplay persuasively cuts blood-curdling rawness with sensitivity and the civility people cultivate in order to live together. Their physical acting is just as incredible. Millie and Tim go through increasingly agonized contortions as they struggle against an ever more powerful, mutual attraction. It can be hard to tell where the flexible actors end and the special effects — credited to a number of the artisans who worked on 'Furiosa' — seamlessly begin. Let's just hope that was a prosthetic in the overhead toilet stall shot.
It's the actors' emotional intelligence, though, that creates the movie's true onscreen magic. This is like an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi. However you slice it, 'Together' is a great love story. The ghastliness of it all is the chef's kiss.
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San Francisco Chronicle
4 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dave Franco reflects on Palo Alto roots, marriage with Alison Brie and their new film ‘Together'
Dave Franco has been in the acting game for two decades, but he was once a sports-obsessed kid growing up in Palo Alto, with posters of heroes such as Giants slugger Barry Bonds and NBA star Vince Carter affixed to his walls. He's reminded of that whenever he visits his mother, author Betsy Franco, and sleeps in his old room. 'She hasn't touched my room since I left,' Franco told the Chronicle during a video interview. 'I still have a bookshelf with my old sports trophies and some of my stuff.' 'And sports cards,' chimed in actress Alison Brie, Franco's wife. 'I can confirm this, as I've spent many nights in Dave's childhood bedroom.' Franco, 40, has left childhood far behind. He and Brie, 42, have been significant others for 13 years and married for eight, and they have put that relationship to the test in ' Together,' a most unusual horror film about a couple whose decade-long relationship is disintegrating — until a spectral force physically propels them together. Michael Shanks' feature directorial debut fits in the body horror genre, but it is a sly commentary on the ups and downs of relationships, dysfunctional and otherwise. In praising the film for the Chronicle, critic Bob Strauss likened it to 'an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi.' 'The monster in this movie, if you will, is an internal force,' Brie observed. 'It's not the type of horror movie where we're running away from an axe murderer. It's a push-and-pull within our own bodies. 'So many of the scenes,' she continued, 'the physical side of it for us was creating that internal tension and that pull, and some of it was established by actually tying ropes and wires around our waists or ankles and pulling us.' 'Together,' which Brie and Franco also produced, is the pair's fifth collaboration. They acted together in the 2017 comedies 'The Little Hours' and ' The Disaster Artist,' and Franco directed Brie in the horror film ' The Return ' (2020) and the rom-com ' Somebody I Used to Know ' (2023). In a separate interview, Shanks said the couple's 'passion and enthusiasm' was crucial to keeping the low-budget shoot on track during the 21-day production schedule in Melbourne, Australia, helping him realize a lifelong dream of making feature films. (The filmmaker previously spoke up to blast a copyright infringement lawsuit surrounding the film last month.) 'It's not just what they bring to the table as actors, but also as producers and as champions of independent filmmaking,' Shanks observed. 'Every single day on set, we were torturing them, having them do this intense physical stuff throughout this film, and they just never complained. We had somebody on the crew who's been working in the film industry for 40 years lugging lights around, this crusty old Aussie guy, and he came up to me and said, 'I've never worked with better actors than these guys.' 'If we were running late, struggling to get shots in, and something needed to be moved, like a light or a prop, you'd turn around and Dave would be there lugging one of the lights around, just totally collaborative like that,' he added. Franco's passion for movies began during a stint at a video store in Palo Alto at age 14 while he was a student at Palo Alto High School. The working age in California at the time was 16, so he toiled for free. 'They essentially paid me by allowing me to take home as many movies as I wanted,' Franco recalled fondly. 'It was the year 1999, which is now regarded as one of the best movie years ever. So I was taking home classic films, as well as very seminal films like 'The Matrix,' 'Fight Club,' ' American Beauty,' ' American Pie,' ' Being John Malkovich,' ' The Blair Witch Project.' It was my initial film school.' Around that time, his older brother James Franco was knocking on doors in Hollywood. A few years later, Dave Franco decided to become an actor while at USC. (Another older brother, Tom Franco, has dabbled in acting but is mainly known as the artist founder of Berkeley's Firehouse Art Collective.) Dave Franco had small roles in films such as ' Superbad ' (2007) and 'Milk' (2008) before breaking through with key supporting roles in ' 21 Jump Street ' (2013) and 'Now You See Me' (2013), which launched a pair of sequels (the third film, 'Now You See Me: Now You Don't,' is due in theaters on Nov. 14.). He met Brie at a Mardi Gras party in New Orleans in 2011 when the actor was in the middle of her run as part of the cast of ' Mad Men ' (2007-15), and they have been inseparable ever since — well, not as inseparable as their characters in 'Together.' 'We're very happy to say that our relationship is nothing like the relationship in the movie,' Brie said with a laugh. 'But just having been together over 13 years, having that shared history, being in love, we knew that would naturally find its way into the script. 'I realized afterward that this shoot made us possibly more codependent than we had been going into it.' Franco agreed. 'Yeah, the whole experience has made us analyze our own levels of codependency, which are probably pretty high,' Franco said. 'I think this movie has a way of really holding a mirror up to the audience and reflecting back to them their feelings about relationships,' Brie added. 'It's already been exciting to see audience reactions. 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Cosmopolitan
8 hours ago
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'Together' Ending, Explained
Together stars real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as Millie and Tim, and immediately opens on a horror scene: a public engagement at a going-away party, met by a delayed yes. Stuck in the suffocating decline of their ten-year relationship and reluctantly engaged, Tim and Millie relocate from their home in the city to a quiet rural town for Millie's new teaching job and a fresh start. On a hike through their woodsy new locale, the couple take shelter from a storm in a cave. This was their first mistake. Or was it the engagement? The move? We digress. Tim and Millie spend the night in the cave and Tim quenches his thirst in the cave's pool. The next morning, they wake up to find their bodies are beginning to fuse. What starts as subtle, accidental contact soon escalates into full-blown body horror, turning their intimacy into something terrifyingly literal. The couple separate and dismiss the whole thing—call it moving stress. Soon after, Tim finds himself drawn to Millie with an almost magnetic force. At first, it seems like an awkward symptom of unresolved intimacy issues, but the episodes grow more intense and uncontrollable, leaving them both disturbed and unsettled. Around this time, Millie's new coworker, Jamie, stops by their house under the guise of a friendly neighborhood welcome. Over dinner, as the couple hesitantly recounts their strange cave experience, Jamie casually drops a chilling detail: the cavern was once the site of a New Age spiritual collective that believed in transcendence through bodily union. That is, until the entire congregation mysteriously vanished after the cave collapsed. Later, Millie drops Tim off at the train station for a music gig (rare!), hoping some distance might ease the growing tension between them. But Tim, overwhelmed by another episode of uncontrollable physical compulsion, abandons the trip and stumbles to Millie's school in a trance-like state. She finds him in the bathroom, confused and panicked, and confronts him inside a stall. The confrontation spirals into a desperate, emotionally charged sexual encounter—only for them to realize, moments later, that they're physically fused at the genitals. The painful process of separating leaves them shaken and literally raw, while Jamie watches from a distance. Millie visits Jamie's home again, and he invites her in with eerie calm and a glass of water (read: water). She opens up about her relationship with Tim, and Jamie responds with a philosophical anecdote about Aristophanes' origin of love. TL;DR: Humans were once whole and split in two, destined to spend their lives searching for their missing half. Jamie speaks of his late husband and their sacred and inevitable union, but their conversation is interrupted when Millie spots a dazed, barely-standing Tim outside the house. Desperate for answers, Tim visits a local doctor, only to be brushed off with a diagnosis of anxiety and a prescription for muscle relaxants. Down with big pharma. Dismissed and medicated, Tim becomes obsessed with tracking down a couple who recently vanished from the area without a trace. In their final photos, he notices the same symbols that he saw in the cave he and Millie stumbled into. In classic horror form, he tries to explain this to Millie, and she rationalizes it away. That night, their bodies betray them once again. You get it at this point, they are fusing. In a desperate attempt at control, they down Tim's newly prescribed pills and pass out. When Tim comes to, he's tied to a chair and sees Millie brandishing a chainsaw. Cut through some horror, and they're bleeding, separate, and somehow alive. Recently ravaged by buzz saw, Tim returns to the cave, following his obsession to its conclusion: he finds the missing couple still alive, horribly fused into a single, moaning half-human entity. Meanwhile, Millie returns to Jamie's house, where she finds a ritualistic home video playing on loop. In it, two men—both eerily resembling Jamie—stand in front of a ceremonial altar, slicing their wrists and pressing the wounds together in union. Jamie's demeanor shifts from charming to menacing as he urges Millie to embrace the same fate with Tim, warning that resisting the transformation only leads to greater suffering. (If you got lost around this time, here's the gist. Jamie wasn't always one person, but two individuals who willingly underwent this fusion ritual and now exist as a single, reconstituted being.) Before Millie can flee, Jamie suddenly slashes her arm in the same place the men in the video cut themselves—initiating the first step of the process by force. She escapes and returns home bleeding and terrified, to Tim who prepares to take his own life, unable to watch his lady die. She begs him to stop and in a moment of radical love, he presses his body to hers, fusing his own flesh to her wound, sealing it and their love. As Spice Girls' '2 Become 1' plays, they sway together, giving in to the transformation as they merge into a single, whole being. Days later, Millie's parents arrive for a weekend visit. The front door bears the same spooky symbol etched into the cave. When it opens, they're greeted by a serene, androgynous figure with a warm smile. It's Tim and Millie—or what remains of them. A small bell hangs by their door, a symbol of the cult, and a hint that the next fusion may have just arrived. In Lorde-ian prose, 'Baby, what was that?' 'Together' is now playing theaters everywhere. Get Tickets
