Crew
Director/Screenplay – Michael Shanks, Producers – Alison Brie, Erik Feig, Dave Franco, Mike Gowap, Julia Hammer, Tim Headington, Andrew Mittman & Max Silva, Photography – Germain McMicking, Music – Cornel Wilczek, Visual Effects Supervisor – Genevieve Camilleri, Visual Effects – Basilic Fly Studio Limited & Rise | Visual Effects Studios, Prosthetics – Screwcrew Studios (Designer – Laurence Van Duynhoven), Production Design – Nicholas Dare. Production Company – 1.21/Princess Pictures.
Cast
Dave Franco (Tim), Alison Brie (Millie), Damon Herriman (Jamie McCabe), Mia Morrissey (Cath), Karl Richmond (Jordy), Jack Kenny (Luke), Aljin Abella (Dr Mendoza), Francesca Waters (Carol)
Plot
Tim and Millie move to a rural town so that she can take a job as a teacher. Tim is an aspiring musician but has had no success even into his thirties. While hiking in the woods, they fall down into a cave and are forced to spend the night. After waking, their legs seem glued together. Afterwards, they find they are affected by a strange condition where they appear to be melding together. Whenever they kiss or have sex, their bodies seem in danger of fusing. They find this difficult to accept until they wake in the night with their bodies physically moving down the hall to the other and trying to merge together.
Together was a feature-length directorial debut for Australia’s Michael Shanks who had previously made several short films and the tv series The Wizards of Aus (2016). Shanks should not be confused with the actor Michael Shanks, best known for Stargate SG-1 (1997-2002).
Body Horror is not really a term I like using on this site. As I have said before, it is a term I have seen it indiscriminately used to cover everything from the cinema of David Cronenberg and The Substance (2024) to fairly much anything with gooey meltdowns or lots of splatter and bodies hacked up. That said, if you were to use Body Horror as a descriptor – a work about the horrors of bodily transformation – Together would be a prime example.
I was searching for another film to make comparison to Together. The obvious one that comes to mind is Society (1989) about the discovery of a secret culture where members engage in orgies where their bodies meld together. Stretching an analogy, there was the Spanish Two (2021) where a man and a woman come around to find they have been surgically conjoined. Not long before watching Together, I also saw the French Else (2024) where a strange condition causes a couple to start fusing into their environment. The opening scene where we get hints of dogs fusing reminds something of the scenes with the dogs in The Thing (1982).
Michael Shanks layers Together with much underlying symbolism about merging and co-dependence. The film opens with a marriage proposal and develops out a whole symbolic undertow about the mutually dependent relationship Dave Franco and Alison Brie have, both financially and in terms of deficiencies of skillsets. There is the horrible story that Dave Franco tells about coming across his mother fallen to pieces because her husband, her Other Half, has died and is still lying in bed beside her.
For a director making his feature-length debut, Michael Shanks demonstrates considerable assurance. The only weakness I would point to is that he has a tendency to rely on dream jumps throughout, which in a horror film are always a bogus, unearned attempt to get a jump. Shanks creates some reasonable horror effects – Brie and Franco engaged in a kiss and finding their lips glued together; Brie waking up to find Franco trying to swallow her hair; and the supremely ick embarrassment of a scene where they have sex in a bathroom cubicle and then discover their genitalia are stuck together. This culminates in some eerie scenes where they wake to find their bodies sliding down the hall towards one another as they sleep and then their hands fuse together, necessitating that she employ a saw to have to cut them apart.
Trailer here