If you’re looking for an above-average “body horror” frightener, the new film TOGETHER starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco will surely be right up your alley. The story of a couple struggling to make their relationship work who suddenly find themselves growing closer and closer together through supernatural forces, does make for one outrageous tale filled with truly gross shots of two bodies attempting to morph into one. (Just look at the poster.) But are the grotesqueries enough? I would argue no as the potential for something slyer is evident in this film from the get-go, yet the filmmakers never capitalize enough on the psychological in a more substantial way. TOGETHER is a horror movie that seems perfectly content to gross out with gusto while leaving something shrewder and adult, even more moving, far behind.
Tim and Millie (real life marrieds Franco and Brie) are a couple in their mid-30s at a crossroads in their relationship. Do they commit to each other through an engagement or continue to move slower until something gives? Tim thinks they’re already doing enough by moving to the country together, a few hours from NYC, for Millie’s new job as a grade school teacher. He’s reluctant to leave his music career behind even though his dreams of being a rock star have resoundingly stalled. Tim is wholly dependent upon Milly for income too and even transporting him about as he has never bothered to learn how to drive. Franco is adept at playing such immature men and yet here, his Tim is not as very charming as in previous roles. Instead, Tim lies, is lazy, and isn’t even particularly well-put together. This man-child needs a shower and a shave, let alone a backbone.
Millie, on the other hand, is very well-appointed, crafty, and brazenly confident. She even boldly gets down on one knee to ask Tim for his hand in marriage at their going-away party in NYC. He stammers and fumbles a simple “yes” for the crowd and she’s taken aback. What does she see in this guy, especially when he’s so fickle about their relationship? It begs questions about codependency and enabling, two themes that could have made for more of a heady psychological character examination here, but writer/director Michael Shanks opts for grossing us out more than giving us food for thought. Soon enough, he’s showing us the duo getting lost in the woods, falling into a pit, and drinking from the brook underground as they’re forced to stay overnight in the wild. Awakening the next morning, Tim and Milly find that their legs are stuck together and pulling them apart leaves nasty, horrific gashes that would require stitches. From there, the film leaves intellectualism behind while going mostly for the extremely visceral.
As their bodies get sicker, Tim experiences blackouts, Milly feels out of sorts too, and a bathroom stall tryst almost leads to ripped-away genitalia. Yet, the couple doesn’t get smarter as their physical issues manifest. If this was a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, Rod Serling would be asking us if this was all in their heads, but the way Shanks approaches the material via noisy, overwrought, and repellant scenes, he seems mostly interested in chronicling disgusting body metamorphosis. His film stops being intellectual and plays as merely visceral.
Better horror is always anchored by at least one smart character trying very hard to think their way out of the villain’s clutches. There was the potential for that here, especially with Milly, but she soon is acting as dimly as Tim does, all but welcoming their ugly fate due to those waters they drank. Brie is too smart of a performer to convince us that Milly would acquiesce so easily and while she and her husband exhibit chemistry together on screen, they fail to ever make us truly root for them staying together as characters. And as their plight turns more ludicrous, the story relegates the pair to horror props. It feels too crass and kills what could have been a love story both horrifying and heartbreaking.
