‘Together’ Review – Alison Brie and Dave Franco Stick Together in this Darkly Funny Romantic Horror
Have you ever felt like you were losing yourself in a relationship? Writer and director Michael Shanks takes that fear and turns it into the central horror of his debut feature Together.
Tim and Millie (played by real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie) have been together for a decade when they uproot their life in the city to move into a big beautiful home in the countryside. Millie is a schoolteacher and Tim is an aspiring musician, but he’s unsure of his place in the world and in his relationship.
When we meet the couple, he seems to have lost his sense of individuality (tellingly, at their goodbye party with friends, Millie points out how cute it is that they inadvertently wore matching outfits—we cut to Tim changing his shirt). He doesn’t really know who he is outside of his relationship, and he’s chafing against that—he loves Millie but feels trapped.
When the pair encounters a supernatural force in the vicinity of their new home, it puts the limits of their relationship to the test.
The marketing of this movie gives a lot of its premise away, but I want to stress that it works best if you go into this one knowing as little as possible.
What I can say is that this is a very strong directorial debut from Shanks. It’s marketed primarily as a horror film, but it’s also a very funny and very romantic movie at heart. It does a remarkable job of weaving those different threads together and balancing its different tones. There are consistent laughs, but also very effective scares, creepy moments, and body horror, not to mention a genuinely romantic core.
Brie and Franco bring their real-life chemistry to the screen to make the film’s central relationship feel lived in and make us want to root for them, despite the obstacles and struggles they face.
A recurring motif in the film is the idea of being oblivious to something rotting right under your nose, like a dead rat rotting away behind a light fixture. The rot creeps in so gradually that you don’t even know you’re breathing it in.
At first, Tim and Millie’s relationship seems to have gone the way of the rat. They’ve clearly lost touch (ha!) with one another, and we wonder if the relationship has simply gone stale after all that time, even if they’re still in the room, breathing in the stink.
But by the end, it’s clear that Shanks has a more hopeful, if twisted, view of love and relationships. The movie walks a fine line between exposing the flaws of its central relationship and asserting that they’re still right to fight for it anyway.
One of my favourite things about horror as a genre is its ability to take grounded human experiences and emotions and amplify them through metaphor. This film takes the fear of commitment and of sharing your life with someone and amplifies it to its logical extreme as a metaphor, raising questions about what it actually means to build a life together and make compromises and become one half of a unit that is a couple.
On top of the great tonal balance and central performances, the visual effects are, for the most part, phenomenal, with a perfect marriage (ha!) of practical and digital effects, aside from one pivotal moment that doesn’t quite land. Beyond that, the body horror is visceral and effective with just the right amount of restraint.
The movie is a little heavy-handed at times, telegraphing certain reveals a little too much. But I really loved a lot of what it’s doing and had such a fun time with it at Fantasia, where the unparalleled crowd experience really made this a blast to watch.
Verdict
Together is the perfect horror rom-com for anyone who’s ever felt trapped, co-dependent, or lost in a relationship. But it’s also for the hopeless romantics and horror fans. It’s a remarkably well-balanced mix of genres and tones, anchored by the lived-in chemistry of its leads.
