5 days ago
Together review — a wickedly effective horror satire
We seem to be in a purple patch of ambitious 'risk-taking' cinema set pieces. With The Naked Gun reboot it was the moment when the entire movie swerved sideways into a nutty film-within-a-film about a deranged snowman. In last week's Weapons it was the unexpected black comedy in the final act (kids + ritualised sparagmos = hilarity). And now, in this wickedly effective horror satire, it's the outrageous midpoint sequence when our two protagonists and 'couple-in-crisis' Tim and Millie (played by real-life marrieds Dave Franco and Alison Brie) are suddenly trapped and grossly melded at the crotch (a supernatural curse is involved) during an impulsive act of intimacy in the children's bathrooms at the school where Millie teaches. They pull, they push, he winces, she yelps, as their cursed organs are seemingly in agony. A loud and hysterical chorus of sympathy howls was, at my screening, the inevitable audience response.
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Tim and Millie, winningly played throughout, have only recently moved from New York City to this tiny upstate hamlet. It's ostensibly for Millie's job, but really it's to revitalise a relationship that's quaking from Tim's lack of self-esteem, his failure as a musician and the recent double-whammy of his father's death and mother's mental breakdown. The beauty of the film and of the screenplay from the novice Australian writer-director Michael Shanks is that it's an unforgiving dissection of co-dependent romantic relationships as well as a giddy and frequently stomach-churning scream-at-the-screen body horror.
And so, near the start, during an exploratory hike, Tim and Millie fall into a woodland sinkhole and there consume the mystical potion that propels them, physically, towards each other with the ultimate aim of violently, gorily, mushing their bodies together (see title) into a single mutant uni-being. It's great fun, and the highlights include a jump scare with Millie's hair, the devilish use of a reciprocating saw and an exquisitely funny deployment of the Spice Girls. You will never, in short, listen to 2 Become 1 in the same way again. ★★★★☆15, 102minIn cinemas from Aug 15
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