It’s hard to wash out the memory of your first time experiencing visceral body horror on screen. The snap of bones, the tearing of flesh, or the impossible bend of limbs becomes a branded mark on your mind after witnessing it for the first time. For some, the dissolving faces of Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark was an unshakeable sight of gnarly body manipulation. For me, the one-two punch of a far-too-young viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre followed by the acidified grandma (implied rather than explicit) and Pierce Brosnan’s visible bone fracture in Dante’s Peak were the moments of body horror that scarred my psyche.
Now, these are fairly tame examples of body horror, so much so that I won’t even be offended if you take umbrage with me labelling them as such. After all, when we read the words ‘body horror’ we think of David Cronenberg morphing Jeff Goldblum into a fly in a horrifying, gruesome manner, replete with a detachable penis, or John Carpenter’s The Thing providing an example of the pitfalls of attempting to revive someone with a defibrillator; in other words, these are films that explicitly utilise the transfiguration of bodies to inform the narrative and its themes. When we see Seth Brundle’s penis in a jar in his bathroom, we feel him losing his identity in more ways than one. These are cinematic events that can dramatically change our relationships with our own bodies, and by virtue our relationship with the screen itself.
About halfway through Together, the feature film debut from Aussie scribe & director Michael Shanks, we’re presented with a moment of body horror which will linger in the mind of many, and will no doubt cause penis-owning audience members to crumple in their seats as Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s co-dependent couple break their sexual intimacy drought with a frenetic fuck in a bathroom stall. Due to plot machinations that I’ll dive into in a moment, Franco’s Tim becomes stuck in Brie’s Millie, with Tim’s skin sticking to Millie like a legless lizard stuck on a bug trap.
Shanks knows that body horror works best when it’s up front, not suggestive, gifting audiences with the sight of an explicit penile trauma shot that rivals There’s Something About Mary’s iconic beans and frank dish to seal the horror of the moment. As a penis-owner myself, the sight of seeing the appendage pulled within an inch of its life is an unsettling one that made my loins twinge with empathetic pain. It’s in moments like ‘The Bathroom Stall’ scene where Shanks shows his clear appreciation for the ickiness of effective body horror, making sure that outside of the narrative inconsistencies, Together leaves a mark.
Hats off to cinematographer Germain McMicking who squeezes audiences into that tight bathroom stall alongside Franco and Brie, pushing us deep into the frenzy and the sweat of the moment, before ripping the band aid from the wound in a well-orchestrated panic attack as the couple realises the desperate situation they’re in. This is the scene of Together that everyone will be talking about; a major moment of explicit body horror that feels relatable and grounded enough to cause discomfort and distress for the audience.
‘The Bathroom Stall’ scene, like most of Together’s impact moments of body horror, plays extremely well out of context. Whoever is subjected to a body horror scene from the film in a bubble will feel suitably unsettled. If Shanks wanted Together to be he stamp on the modern body horror canon, then congratulations, he’s part of the class photo. What’s less effective is the Clag glue that holds the rest of the film in place: the plot and the chemistry between the leads.
Tim and Millie have grown old together over a decade in a stagnating relationship, having failed to move out of the calling each other ‘babe’ part of their relationship and into less juvenile territory, namely, getting married and settling down with kids. The spark of budding love has well and truly been smothered by a blanket of co-dependency, with Tim relying on Millie far more than she does on him. He’s a mid-thirties failed musician who still thinks he’s on the cusp of some kind of relevance, when the reality is he’s a gigger for hire. She’s a schoolteacher who has taken a lucrative remote job, uprooting their relationship in the process and relocating away from their group of friends in the city to the country. When we first meet them, it’s Millie who proposes in front of their friends, with Tim standing in a shocking, stupefied silence as she waits for an answer. When it does finally come in the form of a bumbling ‘yes, of course yes’, it’s not enough to clear the awkward vibe in the room. Subtitles aren’t required to translate the shocked look on their faces that says, ‘why on earth is she staying with him?’
Dave Franco and Alison Brie are married in real life, and as a blessing and a curse to the film, they have an immense level of chemistry on screen.
The blessing is that this partnership gives a lived-in tone to the moments of levity or play between Tim and Millie, showing why they became a couple in the first place. The affection they have for one another is keenly felt in a fateful hike in the woods which leads them to get caught in a torrential downpour before falling into a mysterious Giger-like pit with an eerily enticing dark pool of water at its centre that contains the key to their body-joining future states. They rest in the cave until the storm passes, with Millie effortlessly making light of Tim’s failed music career, laying evidence to the strength of Franco and Brie’s chemistry and connection.
Outside of the explicit body horror, Together is at its best when Brie and Franco are separated. In isolation, Franco manages to slip into a more applicable level of doltish behaviour. A moment where the sweaty Tim waits for a train to take him into the city for a gig is a solid moment which shows that Franco can slip into slightly dramatic roles from time to time. For Brie, her scenes of immersing herself in her new role at the school are imbued with a level of optimism and hope, as if this might turn out ok.
The curse is that that real-life connection undermines the toxic co-dependent nature of Tim and Millie’s relationship. Tim is such a drain on Millie’s existence, so much so that his focus on a failing music career pulls her away from a possible future where she might be married, have kids, or be able to extend herself in whatever direction she may choose. Shanks’ script skews away from fleshing Millie out as a character, inventively making her back story one that thrums in out of tune unison with Tim’s dreams and visions. That works on a textual level, but when it comes to selling that on screen, Franco struggles to be pathetic enough to be a convincing opposition to the earnest, hopeful nature of Brie’s Millie, someone who recognises she’s in a failing relationship, but keeps trying her hardest to try make it work. Instead, he frequently appears as if he’s like an excited puppy dog, so thrilled at being able to make a dirty little horror flick with his wife.
Then there’s the comedy of the piece. While Together features moments of levity, it’s not an out and out laugh fest. For the most part, the jokes work well enough in the moment, adding just enough to lift the tone in between moments of the growing body horror, jump scares, and relationship drama. But, for this weary viewer, the moments of comedy occasionally feel like they undermine the horror of the fritzed relationship between Tim and Millie. This is compounded by a bundle of extraneous mysteries and subplots that make the film end up feeling like an overstuffed meal rather than a simple nourishing dish.
Together is, fundamentally, a body horror film. Its main narrative is a simple one: what if a couple who shouldn’t be in a relationship find themselves physically becoming one. But Shanks saddles this engaging narrative with a B-plot mystery featuring Damon Herriman’s affable and helpful neighbour that goes exactly where you expect it to, leaving no room for surprises. In what has become a seemingly essential appendage to modern horror films that need to really stress that they’re A Metaphor for something, Tim is saddled with an obligatory parental abuse trauma backstory, replete with jump scare flashbacks and nausea inducing imagery of manic faces in dark bedrooms. Doubly disappointing is the realisation that Franco simply cannot dutifully sell the moments where Tim gives Millie a belated trauma-dump about his childhood experiences, giving what should be a powerful scene the air of a high school theatre student delivering their very best snot-sob for their parents.
On a more cynical level, this array of disparate horror motifs feel like they’re employed as a form of sequel baiting, with Shanks’ script giving the barest amount of information about the mystery of the dark water in the cave to fill, with the copious blanks to be filled in in a future entry. The scent of cult-shenanigans and cross-creature body-blending is simply too good an invite to pass up. As I trudged out of the cinema, I was already mentally logging future sequels in my calendar: Together Again coming exclusively to cinemas in 2027, followed by Together At Last in 2029. Book your tickets now.
Maybe I would be less cynical about Together if I didn’t feel like I experienced a hyper-generic experience. Tim and Millie are surface level creations, with Franco and Brie delivering two characters who if I heard them call each other ‘babe’ one more time, I’d leap out of a building to escape being with them any longer. Disappointingly, they’re not frustrating enough to relish in seeing their fate unfurl, nor are they relatable enough for me to feel sympathy for their sticky situation. As the familiar body horror motif melds into the stock standard cult subplot, the generic relationship drama struggles to find enough ground to stand as its own unique thing, making Together feel like a mish-mash of well-trodden themes.
It doesn't help that the most egregious act Together undertakes is that it fails to earn to the right to use an iconic Spice Girls song over its closing moments.
But – and this is the most important aspect of the piece – if I saw Together when I was 15 years old, I can guarantee that it would have tickled my budding horror loving mind for years on end. In that regard, Together works as ‘babe’s first body horror’ experience, but not much more than that.
Director: Michael Shanks
Cast: Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Damon Herriman
Writer: Michael Shanks
Producers: Alison Brie, Mike Cowap, Erik Feig, Dave Franco, Julia Hammer, Tim Headington, Andrew Mittman, Max Silva
Composer: Cornel Wilczek
Cinematographer: Germain McMicking
Editor: Sean Lahiff
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