Together

Love is icky. Love is gross. Love is feeling so completed by someone that you want to live in their skin. At least, according to Michael Shanks' bone-melding body horror, Together. We first meet disgustingly loved-up pair Millie and Tim (real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco) amid their goodbye party, exchanging googly eyes and smiles as they prepare to start afresh in a new home. But beneath the lovey-dovey exterior lies something that doesn’t quite stick: a hint of resentment, a misjudged public declaration of love, and a band-aid of perfection that’s just waiting to be ripped off. And over the next 102 minutes, it does get ripped off. Hard.

It’s no secret that Together gets freaky. After a tumble into an H.R. Giger-esque cavern (a red flag if ever there was one), the newly engaged couple become physically drawn to each other in a manner that goes way further than anything sexual.

When the scares hit, they target the places we are supposed to feel safest with a partner, twisting them into surreal, retina-staining images...

Before things get icky and sticky, however — and kudos to Shanks for taking his time with the central characters — we get a portrait of a codependent relationship, quite literally, as Tim’s inability to drive leaves him homebound without Millie. We see the pair laugh together, support one another, but also allow jealousy to creep in. By the time the real horror contorts itself into the plot, we’ve seen all the dimensions of this messy pair — a testament to Franco and Brie, who carry this more-or-less two-hander with chemistry that has rarely looked this effortless.

By zeroing in on the love story, the film can sometimes take the edge off its own horror. Its escalating grossness never quite reaches the bonkers body-horror heights of The Substance, or the graphic nature of Titane, and a lot of it may feel a bit like Body Horror For Beginners™ — but its overall interests are clearly beyond straight spooks, underlined by a third act which effectively leans into tenderness rather than terror.

Still, when the film aims to make you squirm, it nails it. A bathroom scene in particular traps the couple in an intimate nightmare that’s way more unsettling for what it (mostly) leaves off-screen. And when the scares hit, they target the places we are supposed to feel safest with a partner, twisting them into surreal, retina-staining images rather than going for cheap thrills. (It’s only a slight shame, though, that some moments get let down by ropey CGI.)

Shanks’ fucked-up little love fable has all the kicks fans of horror movies are looking for, but its willingness to dig under the skin of its central relationship and actually interrogate it might just leave you wondering if the horrors we endure for love are worth it, after all.