{"id":10042108,"date":"2025-07-30T14:15:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T18:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10042108"},"modified":"2025-07-31T12:25:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T16:25:39","slug":"together-review-alison-brie-and-dave-franco-are-stuck-with-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/07\/30\/together-review-alison-brie-and-dave-franco-are-stuck-with-each-other\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Together’ Review: Alison Brie and Dave Franco are stuck with each other"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Editor\u2019s Note<\/strong>: This review originally ran as part of our extensive coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and we\u2019re reposting it today due to the film\u2019s wider national release. Scan through\u00a0our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews<\/a>\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Codependency is a nice and fertile emotional ground to sow the seed of a horror story into, but the crop has rarely been this flavor-forward post-harvest. Michael Shanks\u2019 Together<\/strong><\/em> gets rid of most of the cliches surrounding this type of unhealthy relationship in media by honing in on the talents of his leads, real-life partners Alison Brie and Dave Franco, seizing on their on-screen fireworks and strong wit to deliver one of the more interesting body horror pictures in a bit. They play a couple trapped in a relatable experience — they start realizing they don\u2019t know where one person in the relationship begins and where the other person ends up — only, this time, it\u2019s fully literal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim (Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are taking a big step: They\u2019ve bought a house in a small town, secluded in the forest, giving up life in the big city so that Millie can work her dream job at a local school. It\u2019s a huge change for Tim, and it\u2019s one coming at a bad time — his parents died a short time before the film began, and he\u2019s been suffering from an acute depression. But he wants to support his girlfriend (she wants to get married, but he\u2019s nervous), so he agreed to the move, even if it meant having to take a train into the city to play in gigs. He\u2019s a grown-ass man bumming rides, and Millie knows he\u2019s got a touch of Peter Pan syndrome in him. She loves him anyway, even as the loss seems to make him more withdrawn. One day, while caught on a rainstorm on a hike, the pair fall into a sinkhole and find themselves trapped in a bizarre underground cavern. The good news, at least, is that they aren\u2019t hurt and are well-prepared to wait out the storm — well, aside from the water. Tim takes a chance, gives up the last of their bottled water and drinks from a strange, murky pool. It tastes ok, so no harm, no foul, right? They settle down for a nap on the cave floor, and things seem to be ok, at least for the time being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next morning, however, they wake up and discover that their legs are stuck together — like, tearing the skin when they pry them apart — and Tim just blames it on \u201cmildew\u201d or something. A pattern begins to emerge: Millie goes to do something, and strange shit starts to happen to Tim. He has a strange seizure-like loss of consciousness and when she leaves to get groceries, and then starts to go through serious withdrawal when she\u2019s not around. He starts showing up at her work at inopportune times, abandoning shows he\u2019s scheduled to play, and finds himself doing strange shit while he\u2019s sleeping. At first, Millie\u2019s just glad he\u2019s paying more attention to her, but once they escalate, she has no clue what to do. A co-worker (Damon Herriman) offers her some comfort and advice, seeming to know something about what\u2019s going on with the pair. But whatever\u2019s wrong with Tim soon infects her as well — and it seems like, whatever it is, it wants them to consume and merge with one another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Per usual, Brie and Franco are a winning pair — the former being a bubbly-yet-solid grounding for the latter to bring an electrical energy to — and their chemistry is off-the-charts. They\u2019re great at sharing co-protagonist duties, and they\u2019re fiercely committed to the reality of the film: There\u2019s no wink-wink bullshit here, as funny as it might be. It takes something special for two people to be this credible in an incredulous situation, and Shanks\u2019 approach ensures that their characters are strongly established even before the body horror kicks into fifth gear. He also wisely avoids battle-of-the-sexes shit, presenting us with two fully-rounded characters with recognizable attributes that the viewer can relate to — if you\u2019re unable to see something of yourself in either character, I congratulate you on your commitment to stoicism (please see the Public Domain for your free copy or Meditations<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for those of us who have endured some form of codependent relationship, Shanks has a surprising amount of empathy for people caught in the dynamic. There are no easy villains or people to blame, just messy folks trapped in a strange situation right as their relationship is at a rough point. In making certain metaphorical aspects of a relationship literal, Shanks runs a little aground — the shock of the ending had me feeling a little odd about it, but upon some reflection, it feels appropriately ambiguous and not prescriptive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Together<\/em> is, ultimately, a first-rate horror-comedy, using its leads to sell the emotional reality of its world while containing enough cringeworthy body horror to sustain freaks in need of another dose of The Substance<\/em>. There are some incredibly gross images here — one large yuck comes  when Franco sleep-eats Brie\u2019s hair while they sleep in their shared bed, with about a foot of it trapped in his throat when he\u2019s finally stirred from his nightmare by her screaming, not to mention the fucked up form of magnetism that causes them to get dragged across a hallway towards each other, or the actual physical \u201cmerging,\u201d with all of its under-skin bone crawling and snapping. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a swell debut for Shanks, and it\u2019s also, weirdly enough, the second Sundance in a row in which terrible shit happens to Dave Franco in one of the best movies at the festival. Maybe that\u2019s just his secret sauce in current moment: Body horror is what the people want in Park City, and Franco\u2019s steadily becoming the patron saint of the midnight portion of the program. 
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This review originally ran as part of our extensive coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and we\u2019re reposting it today due to the film\u2019s wider national release. Scan through\u00a0our full coverage of\u00a0Sundance reviews\u00a0from this year\u2019s festival, and check out our\u00a0full archives of past editions. Codependency is a nice and fertile emotional ground to sow the seed of a horror story into, but the crop has rarely been this flavor-forward post-harvest. Michael Shanks\u2019 Together gets rid of most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10040614,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[16640,12147,26409,35354,21272,35309,11434,276],"class_list":["post-10042108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-alison-brie","tag-dave-franco","tag-header","tag-michael-shanks","tag-sundance","tag-sundance-2025","tag-sundance-film-festival","tag-together"],"yoast_head":"\n'Together' Review: Alison Brie and Dave Franco are stuck with each other<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Shanks' debut is a first-rate horror-comedy, using its charismatic leads 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