‘Together’ Takes Co-Dependency to A Delightfully Gruesome Extreme [Sundance 2025 Review]
Grisly, propulsive, and gleefully buoyed by its vicious conflation of domestic angst and body horror, Together, from director Matthew Shanks, often feels like it’s trying to sardonically subvert the idioms we tend to graft onto couples in motions of love. Phrases like “better half,” being “head over heels” or “getting lost in another’s eyes” are just a handful of expressions that are corrupted and visualized brutally as Shank tells the story of Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Allison Brie), a couple who move to the countryside for a fresh vocational start and to hopefully galvanize their rocky relationship, only to experience terrors that will test the limits of their love and bodies.
Together is a slick and incisive look at the dangers of codependency, but it never forgets to firstly be a grotesque and squeamish joyride, thanks to Brie and Franco’s commitment to embodying the demented thrills of when two become one.
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Part of the delight of Together is that from the start, Shanks does all the table setting for how things might go awry for Millie and Tim; the excitement comes from seeing which ingredients will first come into play in this nightmare cocktail he’s crafted. It’s not that the film’s script is meta or self-referential about its tropes, but rather there’s a confident rhythm to Together’s proceedings that reflects a refreshing cognizance: we know things will horrifically escalate, it’s just fun to see how.
For example, the film’s cold open sees two rescue dogs in search of a missing couple, fuse into a monstrosity ripped straight out of The Thing after drinking from an underground wellspring in the countryside. Then, in the next scene, we witness Millie and Tim announce to their friends that they’re moving from Melbourne to somewhere more rural. We know before they do that they’ll be settling into the heart of the aforementioned dread.
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The genesis for the couple’s move into bucolic bliss is so Millie can pursue her budding teaching career. Tim feels torn about this as he knows their new home’s distance from the artists in the city means that his hopes of becoming a musician may be on ice. It’s evident that the two are more concerned with living into the idea of a relationship rather than putting the work into what it takes to be a functioning couple, but being cut off from one’s community has a way of forcing people to reckon with their dysfunction. Call it passivity or stubbornness, while Tim and Millie would perhaps be better off seeing other people, they can’t bring themselves to leave each other despite their grievances, and the rest of Together will test just how much they’re willing to sacrifice for each other.
As a real-life couple, Brie and Franco offer authenticity to the proceedings that can only come from a storied, off-screen history of trust and collaboration. Tim and Millie are a couple who have allowed years of unsaid conflict to petrify into an awkward and flimsy peace. It’s a testament to Brie and Franco’s body language that they can display an innate uncomfortability around each other’s presence even if there’s a verisimilitude of harmony. A cringe yet humorous sequence sees Millie propose to Tim in front of all their friends during their going away party; Franco’s face feels like it goes through the five stages of grief when he realizes what Millie’s doing before coughing out an affirmative.
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This is all build up for when the two go hiking and stumble upon the watering hole we see in the prologue. After one of them naively drinks the water, the two realize that in a very literal sense, they can’t escape from each other’s presence. In a claustrophobic and immersive sequence, when Millie goes for errands, we witness Tim go into a fugue-like state as his body batters and bruises itself trying to reconnect and be in physical contact with Millie.
This is when the film kicks into a brilliant distillation of its themes: the two have to learn to work together yet keep their distance while warring with their bodies. The more the two touch, the harder (and more painful) it becomes to pull away from each other. There’s a twisted joy in seeing how Shanks transforms physical touch, from handshakes to hugs, into sites of squeamish and goopy union. One wince-inducing scene comes when Tim and Millie have sex for the first time after a dry spell. Let’s just say “pulling out” has never quite been so terrifying.
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It’s clever how Brie and Franco’s characters capture that tragic feeling of how you can feel distance with someone even in close proximity. It’s equal parts humorous and frightening to see the ways Shank juxtaposes this emotional distance, with the primal urge Tim and Millie’s bodies feel to be in constant contact. It speaks to the ways our inner thoughts and embodied desires can not be in sync, and it’s to Brie and Franco’s credit they can sell this tortured and contrasting form of attraction to each other.
Equally as rewarding is seeing the ways Tim and Millie have to set aside their dysfunction to work together to stop this force that’s seeking to fuse them into one indistinguishable mass. While there’s plenty of gore, between the coalescing bodies and pointed amputations, the film delights in raising the sort of questions about codependent relationships without ever feeling the need to name its themes explicitly. Despite intimacy, Tim and Millie feel lost to each other, as if their very bodies are a barrier to a deeper union; what happens when the boundaries between flesh begin to disintegrate and they’re able to explore each other without restriction? This is the type of gruesome yet thought-provoking idea that Together explores to thrilling effect and its macabre limit, acknowledging that the safety we try to find in another’s body may be where the most ghastly horrors lie.
Summary
Together is a gruesome yet thought-provoking exploration of co-dependency bolstered by stellar performances from Allison Brie and Dave Franco.
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