Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Together’ Review: Dave Franco and Alison Brie Are a Couple Falling Apart (and Fusing) in a Looney-Tunes Bash About the Body Horror of Love
Body horror is having a moment. Not that it ever went away. It’s been with us, in an official gross-out capacity, ever since the term was coined around the films of David Cronenberg, who invented body horror as we know it — squishy, fleshy, and, in a weird way, brainy. Cronenberg has always been a filmmaker of ideas; the ickier his images of body mutation get, the surer you can be that they’re all a heady metaphor. In recent years, other directors, like Luca Guadagnino (“Suspiria”) and Julia Ducournau (“Titane”), have taken up the body-horror mantle, and I think we saw a body-horror apotheosis with “The Substance,” in which the cathartic climax — the heroine exploding into a monster mass of festering flesh — felt like the ultimate metaphor for what happens when you mess with the flesh that God gave you.
“Together” is a Sundance movie that premiered under the festival’s Midnight banner, which means that it’s basically allowed to be the opposite of everything most Sundance movies are. It’s the rare film-festival horror film that could wind up playing in megaplexes, the way “The Substance” did. Not that it’s nearly as good; this is more of an unhinged roller-coaster acid-trip if-it-looks-weird-do-it freak-out of a movie.
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Yet it’s fun (in a rather bumptious way), it stars two very good actors (Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who are a real-life couple) playing a couple who have as many issues as couples do in real life, and it works as a totally unhinged yet far from mindless thriller built around a Big Idea. When it was over, I thought: This is the sort of movie Cronenberg would have been making if he were less of an earnest Canadian brainiac and more of a junk-food sensationalist.
Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) have been together for 10 years, and still love each other, but they have enough problems that their relationship has curdled into a habitual “what are we doing here?” testy comfort/ discomfort zone. She’s a grade-school teacher, and he’s an indie-rock musician living on hipster fumes. So the two are making a change, pulling up stakes from the city and moving to a town in the countryside, where she has landed a teaching gig, and he’s going to diddle with his music and then leave for a while to go on tour with his buddies’ band.
At their going-away party, she gets down on her knees to propose — one of those public declaration scenes that turns even more awkward than usual, based on his response. (He says yes, but in a way that means “yes…I guess.”) Which doesn’t exactly set their new life on a great course. Neither does the fact that the place they’re going to is next to a woods, and in the woods is a cave in the ground, and in the cave are some weird objects (a bell, church pews) along with a supernatural force, which means that if you drink the water in the cave, you’re going to have a kind of spell put on you.
As the two settle into their new house, Michael Shanks, the film’s Australian writer-director, pulls an anything-goes series of shocking portents. He’s pretty good at it. When Tim smells something strange coming from a ceiling light, then unscrews the light base to see what’s up there, what he finds is queasy enough to make you giggle. There’s also a vision from Dave’s past — one of those super-creepy faces that grin (which for Tim turns out to be someone quite close to home).
Then Tim and Millie take a hike through the woods, and as a rainstorm begins, he falls down into that cave, and she follows. They aren’t trapped there (though they decide to wait out the storm by spending the night); it’s just about 10 feet down, with plenty of ridges to climb back out. But Tim, making the mistake that two dogs did in the film’s prelude sequence, is thirsty and drinks the water. When he and Millie wake up, their legs are sticking to each other, as if they were glued together. They’re able to pry themselves apart, but this is square one of what’s going to happen. Their two bodies literally want to merge.
That sounds like an eccentric thing for two bodies to do, even in a horror film. But it’s telling that the image that dominates the second half of “Together” — it has to do with hands sliding underneath skin — is an uncanny (if coincidental) echo of the climactic image in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer.” That was not a body-horror film, but it did present a disarmingly fleshy fantasy of romantic communion.
“Together,” while unabashedly a horror film, is very much a love story. I’m not going to say that Franco and Brie have “used” their offscreen partnership to fuel their acting, but Tim and Millie have a way of sniping at each other that feels lived-in. It’s not just movie-cute arguing. You feel their history, and how they push each other’s buttons. And that’s connected to the film’s theme, which is that when two people are meant to be together, even their fighting is part of it. They’re not always lovely-dovey, but they’re something more profound. They’re unified in spirit and maybe, the movie says, in flesh.
In school, most of us learned Plato’s definition of love: a single body that was separated, and the two halves are searching for each other. (If you find your true other half, that’s love.) Here, that theory is put forth by Jamie, Millie’s new colleague, played by Damnon Herriman with a friendly sharp-edged ambiguity that makes us think, “What’s up with him?” Let’s just say that it has to do with a very creepy smiling cult.
I’m making “Together” sound like a rather elevated horror film, but rest assured: There are plenty of scenes that are there so the audience can scream with laughter, as they watch Tim and Millie have sex in a restroom and get stuck together you-know-where (they manage to uncouple), or confront their ordeal using duct tape and a reciprocating saw. In an age when practical effects have become hip again, I appreciated that some of the film’s handmade visual effects are ingenious, and a few are unabashedly cheesy; that used to be part of the fun of horror. Audiences should have fun with “Together,” a body-horror movie about a serious thing — love — that never takes itself too seriously.
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