This grotesque body horror is a case of come to gag, stay for the gags

Telegraph

2 days ago

'If we don't split now, it'll be so much harder later,' Millie forlornly tells her boyfriend, Tim – setting up one of the great horror told-ya-sos of recent years. At the start of this energisingly grotesque debut feature from Australia's Michael Shanks, these two young not-yet-marrieds – played for meta-points by real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie – find themselves at a fork in the road.
His career as a musician has stalled, while hers as an English teacher now depends on them quitting their city apartment for a rural fresh start. The bad news is this joint move is being made when the pair have never felt less attached. The good is that a lovely new home awaits: an attractive clapboard cottage in the country with a spacious kitchen, plenty of bedrooms – and a cursed subterranean spring within easy walking distance. On the sort of hike that begins with the suggestion 'Shall we follow this trail of sinister iron bells inscribed with occult sigils into the forest?', Franco inevitably ends up drinking from this transparently satanic chasm, and soon thereafter feels physically drawn to his partner in a way he hasn't in months.
Or, in fact, ever. Supernatural forces keep yanking him into her presence in a trance, while in moments of intimacy their lips and limbs become temporarily superglued. Indeed, 'joined at the hip' would be a polite way to describe them after one heroically revolting sequence, which features some memorable flesh-stretching sound effects and what I hope was a convincing prosthetic.
With that twangy flourish, Together positions itself in that fruitful strain of horror which takes a metaphorical reading of a common human problem and turns it into a one-off real-life nightmare. In short, what The Babadook did for depression, Hereditary for family trauma and Rosemary's Baby for pregnancy, this does for couples who can't work out when, or if, to call it quits.
The familiar-in-each-other's-skin chemistry between Brie and Franco never quite feels essential to the project, but certainly greases its wheels. You buy that these two are a long-term item, but also that her mounting frustration might cause her to look twice at an affable new colleague played by Damon Herriman, whose strangely unplaceable appearance serves as a visual feed-line for one of the film's more satisfying pit-of-the-stomach-drop moments.
It's one of its more amusing, too. Despite its elevated horror trappings (note the extremely serious opening credits font), Together grows increasingly droll as it squelches along – even if in its middle act it seems a little uncertain of exactly how funny it wants to be. But there's a chuckling fiendishness to some of the couple's later predicaments that feels closer in spirit to Japan's Takashi Miike, the director of Audition, than the more satirically charged body horrors of David Cronenberg, while a joke about a certain chart-topping Nineties pop album resolves itself after almost an hour with such outrageous nerve that I let out a bark. Come to gag, stay for the gags – or vice versa.