How much do you love your significant other? Let’s rephrase the question: Do you love them so much that you can’t bear to be apart from them? Like, literally apart from them? Midway through Together, the debut feature from Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks, a character trots out Plato’s theory of halves. The Gods had once torn people in two, the philosopher declared. Each half then spends the rest of their lives looking for their complimentary missing piece — their one true soulmate. Only then will a person be complete.
On paper, this sounds like romantic bliss. In reality, such things would resemble goopy, gory body horror. This movie asks: Why not both?
Not that this impressively splatter-friendly film necessarily starts off with stars in its eyes. Millie (Alison Brie) is a New Yorker who’s just accepted a teaching gig upstate. She’s been with Tim (Dave Franco), her musician boyfriend — well, Millie thinks that term is a little immature, so she refers to him as her “romantic boy partner,” which simply rolls off the tongue — for close to decade. Yet he’s not crazy about the idea of leaving the big city, where career opportunities and adventure and the chance to live in a permanent hipster Neverland reside. Of course Tim is making the move to the country with Millie. They’re a couple. His reluctance, however, is tinged with resentment. And she’s slightly miffed that though they’ve been with each other for almost a decade, he still isn’t fully onboard with the idea of diving headfirst into actual adulthood with her. Even before their going-away party starts going bad, we’re already beginning to see the movie’s resident monster lurking in the shadows. It’s the ultimate thirtysomething male horror: commitment.
Once Millie and Tim settle into her — sorry, “their” — dream house, they began exploring the countryside into between bouts of bickering. During a hike one late afternoon, the two discover an underground cave the hard way, i.e. falling right into it via a hole in the ground. This isn’t your usual subterranean spot, however. It appears to be the remnants of a church, filled with bells and rotting pews. It’s also located near a natural spring, which both Millie and Tim eventually end up drinking from. Viewers may remember the film’s preamble, in which two lost canines also sipped from that same body of water. Things did not end well for those pups.
Soon, some changes began to occur in the couple’s relationship, not to mention their actual physical beings, and you slowly begin to understand why Together is, in fact, called Together. Shanks started out making VFX-heavy shorts in Melbourne, and he’s translated a mildly gonzo sensibility from those brief works into something that feels like a showcase tailor-made for these particular IRL spouses. Brie specializes in these kind of take-action Type-A characters, as well as making women like Millie feel both sympathetic and slightly edgy and brittle. Franco has made a screen career out of playing handsome, likable dudes — call them Dave Franc-bros — that you want to throttle. Real-life chemistry doesn’t always translate to the moving pictures, but there’s rapport between the two of them that smooths over a fuck-ton of rough patches here.
They’re also both highly physical performers, which comes in handy once the film shifts gears from voyeuristic couples-therapy-session run amuck to the sort of extreme, practical-effects–heavy horror movie you associate with David Cronenberg and, now, Coralie Fargeat. (Make it The Substance, but for relationship ruts, loss-of-identity crises, and gamophobia!) Throw in a creepy-friendly neighbor played by Damon Herriman, an actor with a reassuring smile who’s played Charles Manson twice, and you have the makings of a film that understands how to colonize the middle ground between aww and ew. The movies have taught us that love means never having to say you’re sorry. Together taps you on the shoulder and says, Well, yeah, that may be true… but occasionally, you do have to spill a lot of blood, saw apart some fused limbs, and put squeamish viewers through the ringer in the name of cinematic amore.
It’s a great date night flick, in other words, assuming couples don’t mind watching each other vomit during a screening. (This would also make a great double feature with the recently released Oh, Hi!, another parable of commitment issues marinated in sex and dread.) No one could accuse Together of being an instant modern horror classic — it’s too muddled in its aims, too seat-of-pants sloppy and slapdash for that, although the flailing looseness plays in the movie’s favor during a truly phantasmagoric climax. Future cult-film status among codependent lovers, however, is almost assured.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Yet the single scariest sequence happens early on. Tim is giving a toast to all of their friends at their farewell soirée, telling them how much they will miss everybody. There’s a gasp. He quickly turns around to see Millie on one knee, her hands miming the holding of an engagement ring, proposing to him in front of all their friends. He’s taken aback. She’s hurt. You see, in miniature, how the fissures in this relationship can suddenly turn into a canyon — and this is before they move to a remote domicile apart from their respective support systems. It’s bone-chilling romantic cringe-comedy, in the form of a public nightmare. And for a split second, a movie so dedicated to getting under horror fans’ skin truly succeeds in making you want to crawl out of yours.
From Rolling Stone US
