PARK CITY, Utah—A romantic relationship is a union, and Together takes that idea to its gonzo extreme. A playfully gory Cronenbergian comedy that picks up where The Substance left off, Michael Shanks’ directorial debut mines a couple’s stresses and strains for gruesome outrageousness that lets audiences in on the joke without resorting to wink-wink self-consciousness.
Featuring real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie as long-time partners who find that commitment means jumping in with both feet (and hands, and everything else), the film, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a giddy grotesquerie that has midnight-movie crowd-pleaser written all over it.
At their going-away party, Tim (Franco) is unhappy that he and girlfriend Millie (Brie) are dressed as veritable twins. He’s also less than pleased about their relocation to the suburbs so Millie can teach at a small school. Continuing to cling to his rock-star dreams at the age of 35, Tim is something of a man-child whose thin mustache and mullet-y haircut give off hipster-dirtbag vibes. Millie’s best friend thinks he’s a loser and isn’t shy about saying it, but Millie still holds out hope that their current difficulties are just a phase, and that before long, Tim will resume showing her genuine affection—and want to have sex with her.
In front of their guests, Tim awkwardly freezes when Millie proposes marriage, and once they’ve moved into their new home, things don’t improve between the two. After rejecting Millie’s erotic advances, Tim suggests that they go hiking in the nearby woods. While this is a nice idea in theory, in practice it quickly devolves into a disaster, with the duo getting lost and soaked by a torrential downpour, and then falling down a giant hole in the ground that boasts a mysterious bell hanging from its edge.
Inside the dark, dank cavern, Tim and Millie bicker and start a fire, and when Millie announces that she’s parched, Tim gives her their lone water bottle. To slake his own thirst, Tim drinks from a circular pool—an act that’s more reckless than he realizes, as made clear by a prologue in which two pooches gulp from the same source and, shortly thereafter, appear to monstrously merge.
The next morning, Tim and Millie awaken to discover that their calves are stuck together. As they painfully detach, Tim theorizes that maybe it’s the result of mildew—one of many instances in which Shanks’ script delivers goofiness that’s designed to pay off again down the road. Upon escaping their subterranean lair (which additionally contains what appear to be fragmented church pews), Millie strikes up a friendship with her colleague Jamie (Damon Herriman), whose questions about Tim and behavior during a subsequent pop-in at the house suggest, to Tim, that he has eyes for her.
Initially, however, this is a minor issue compared to the weirdness that’s fast becoming a regular facet of their day-to-day, whether it’s Tim sniffing out a collection of rats (their tails tied together) in a light fixture, or his lip attaching to Millie’s during an impulsive make-out session.
Shanks piles on early hints about the couple’s impending fate and, also, the means by which they’ll cope with it (hello, Chekov’s electric saw!), and a large part of the thrill of Together is knowing what’s coming and yet excitedly waiting to see it take place.
For instance, when a harried Tim can’t stand departing on a train to a gig—because it will take him away from Millie—he unexpectedly shows up at her school and seduces her in a boys’ bathroom, culminating with toilet-stall coitus that, considering his sticky situation, can only climax in one way. The director builds, anxiously and hilariously, to his stretchy money shot, and from there, he continually ups the ante via set pieces defined by a marriage of flesh and bone.
Tim and Millie’s increasingly conjoined and codependent condition is an amusing complication for their relationship, and Together has gleeful fun pushing its two protagonists together at the same time that they’re pulling apart. Millie fears that she and Tim aren’t in love but merely used to each other, and she resents him for being a stunted adolescent who has no career prospects and can’t drive. Tim, meanwhile, feels simultaneously emasculated and angry at Millie, not to mention strangely drawn to her for reasons he can’t quite comprehend.
Attraction and repulsion are the twin forces vying for supremacy in Shanks’ film, which amplifies tension by having Millie seek comfort from Jamie, Tim research a pair of hikers who went missing months earlier in the same region, and both of them learning—in terrifying fashion—that they’ve become akin to inseparable magnets.
Together has its fair share of bone-chilling sights (highlighted by a nightmare involving Tim’s ghoulishly smiling dead mother) and manages to make most of them simultaneously unnerving and ridiculous. Together is the rare horror-comedy that doesn’t let the latter negate the former, and it follows through on its premise with crazed confidence.
Moreover, its action benefits from assured aesthetics and staging. Shanks knows how to frame a shot and to develop escalating madness, and his scripting is coherent and strategic. Having Franco and Brie doesn’t hurt either; as thirtysomethings beset by an unholy affliction that’s directly related to their interpersonal problems, the stars are captivatingly harried, hostile, and humorous, exhibiting precisely the sort of testy yet affectionate chemistry the material demands.
With so few characters, Together has a somewhat difficult time concealing its later surprises, although the film is less interested in blindsiding audiences than in making them laugh and squeal. Generating novel and nasty ways to force its main characters to (literally and figuratively) face their hang-ups, Shanks’ maiden behind-the-camera effort twists and turns, snaps and cracks, and oozes and gushes on its way to a finale that’s at once inevitable and electrifying.
Through their ordeal, Tim and Millie remember the reason they first believed they were perfect complements for each other. Satisfyingly finishing what it started, this clever genre affair presents a demented vision of amour in which the surest way to stay together for the long haul is by turning two into one.
