If superhero cinema is losing its lustre, then the same can’t be said to be true about horror, which is on something of a roll this year. In the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve had the extraordinary and unsettling Bring Her Back and Zach Cregger’s remarkable and inventive sophomore effort Weapons. This inadvertent unholy trinity is now completed by Together, the first full-length feature by Australian director Michael Shanks.
Rarely has a film been more aptly titled; this is a film about two people in a relationship who are slowly drifting apart but who find themselves drawn back together in the most literal fashion by something inexplicable (and unexplained) and supernatural.
Real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie are Tim and Millie, who move from the city to the country so she can take up a new post teaching at the local elementary school. Tim, who has already excruciatingly responded with hesitation to Millie’s marriage proposal at their friend-packed leaving party, is a frustrated rock star who hasn’t quite grown up or accepted that his childhood dreams just aren’t going to come true. There’s a growing distance between them, and their move to their new home looks to be doing little more than temporarily papering over the cracks.
The pair set off to explore the countryside around their new home, and they fall into a dank, fetid cave where they’re forced to spend the night. Tim drinks from a pool in the cave, and the two wake up in the morning with their legs partially welded together. They clamber out of the cave, but soon Tim finds himself disturbingly drawn physically towards Millie – the aftermath of an impromptu sex session is agonising and eye-watering.
Millie’s not-quite-right fellow teacher Jamie McCabe (Damon Herriman) joins them for dinner and tells them about another young local couple who disappeared without trace and later reminisces with Millie about his apparently deceased husband. Meanwhile, Tim, increasingly disoriented and discovering a link between the missing couple and the mysterious cave, decides to return to the scene of the couple’s earlier – and apparently life-changing – traumatic experience…
Together is a bizarre and often surreal experience; it’s a story about dependency told from the perspective of a couple who probably don’t belong together, whose relationship has started to crumble, and yet, as it transpires, absolutely belong together and can’t exist apart. In some ways, the idea and its realisation seem quite absurd. Indeed, there’s an element of humour underpinning the drama as it becomes outlandish and grotesque and stomach-troubling – the body horror somersaults over the ick factor at several points.
What really sells the story when it might seem too incredible and utterly implausible is the very clear bond between the two stars, who bring their own personal chemistry to the intensity of the relationship between Tim and Millie. There’s a strange sort of romantic synergy in the very final sequences when Tim and Millie come together to the strains of a Spice Girls ballad.
Together is both terrifying and beautiful, an exploration of personal connection and interaction taken to extremes. It’s occasionally uneasy viewing but it’s also raw, touching and deeply human, marrying sometimes shocking body horror to a heart-wrenching story of love gone off the rails and then finding its way back in unimaginable circumstances.
Together is in cinemas now in the UK and USA.
