NATHAN WEINBENDER:
“You complete me,” went one famous rom-com platitude, and the new body horror freakout Together turns that line into a sick joke. This is a film about the absurdities of codependency and what it’s like to be so close to someone that it’s like you’re physically fused to them. It’s got a great hook, but like so many failed relationships, it has to go and overcomplicate things.
It starts with a mid-30s couple, Tim and Millie, leaving the city for a quiet house in the country. They’re played by real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco, who must have channeled past arguments into their characters. Tim and Millie genuinely seem to love one another, but there’s a tension simmering beneath even the most banal of conversations.
They go hiking in the woods near their house, get caught in a rainstorm and fall into a pit, which contains a strange altar that looks to have grown out of the rocks and dirt. Then they start to notice that, when they get too close to one another, they have a hard time pulling themselves apart.
At first, their legs or arms stick together, then their hands sink into one another’s flesh like Play-Doh, and finally they’re flying toward each other as if they’re being yanked around by magnets. You don’t want to know what happens when they have sex.
First-time writer-director Michael Shanks has a background in visual effects, and his practical effects here are obviously indebted to the comically depraved work of Brian Yuzna, whose movies often had more latex than human flesh.
What’s amusing about the movie is the purely physical stuff, and it sometimes plays like blunt-force slapstick. As Tim and Millie are dragged across the floor, slammed into walls and twisted into literal knots, I couldn’t help but think of Steve Martin’s contortions in All of Me. You might cringe—and the crackly, leathery sound effects are cranked to 11—but you also laugh at how nastily inventive and relentless it is. When it’s really humming along, it has the macabre, funhouse-mirror style of Beetlejuice-era Tim Burton, or of Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses.
Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, the screenplay forces a fairly boring explanation onto all of this: unfortunate because it undercuts the mystery and tension of the premise, inevitable because so many contemporary horror films feel the need to overload themselves with metaphor. The movie also hurls so much tired horror imagery at us we’re tempted to duck out of the way: creepy drawings made by children, unsettling videos playing on old TVs, shadowy figures that come skittering down hallways, several “it was all a dream” fakeouts, and a weaselly next-door neighbor played by Damon Herriman, who has a monopoly on these kinds of roles.
Together works on the simple but visceral drive-in movie level of blood, guts and flesh, and Brie and Franco are convincing in roles where they’re mostly wailing and writhing. It’s a shame that it has to saddle itself with a plot that’s not only ridiculous but predictable. I suppose, to quote another classic cinema line about a cracked relationship, nobody’s perfect.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on KPBX.