Together

You might not notice the smell at first, but the rot will slowly overwhelm your senses if you wait too long to do anything about it. If that doesn’t sound romantic, well, at least it’s a novel, more vivid metaphor for fixing a problem before it’s too late than the old frog-in-boiling-water story. Writer/director Michael Shanks’ Sundance hit stars real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a codependent couple looking to reconnect after slowly drifting apart over the course of several years. Unfortunately for Millie and Tim, they're about to learn the hard way to be careful what you wish for.

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Still reeling from the loss of his parents, Tim seems happy enough to depart the city for the country when Millie receives a rural teaching gig — though not happy enough to immediately accept when she unexpectedly proposes at their going-away party, leading to one of the most uncomfortable moments in a movie replete with them. He’s a struggling musician who’s yet to wake up from his rock-star dreams, and she doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s never going to happen. Both of them want to make their relationship work, but from the beginning it seems as though they’re fighting an uphill battle. It goes downhill quickly — quite literally, in the case of a hike through the nearby woods that sees them falling into an underground cave.

In true horror movie fashion, Tim drinks from a stagnant pool of water the moment he gets thirsty and neither of them notice that the interior of this subterranean lair resembles the derelict spaceship from Alien. When they wake up the next morning, an unknown substance has stuck their legs together. Rather than a detailed plot summary that will give too much away, consider Plato’s theory, presented by Aristophanes in the Symposium, that all of us originally had doubled bodies with two heads and two sets of limbs that all faced away from each other. Zeus punished these beings by splitting them in two after they attempted to scale Olympus, hence why lonely people who’ve yet to find love are said to be looking for their other half. “We used to be complete wholes in our original nature,” Aristophanes proclaims, “and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

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It’s a strange, oddly beautiful vision, one that Shanks not only explicitly mentions but filters through the body-horror influences of David Cronenberg and John Carpenter. The result is one of the more gruesomely romantic horror movies ever made, a fusion of disparate parts that aren’t always pretty but nonetheless fit together more seamlessly than they probably should. At its best, Together is like hearing a bump in the night and being unable to fall asleep because you’re waiting for the next one. Eventually the anticipation becomes worse than the sound itself and hearing it is almost a relief, dissonant though it may be.

The result is one of the more gruesomely romantic horror movies ever made.

Shanks has composed a kind of codependent lullaby in which both halves of a fractured hole are as desperate to get away from each other as they are to cling together. Neither seems like a good option, but surely one is worse? Franco and Brie have worked together before, including in his underrated directorial debut The Rental, but this seems destined to be the joint project for which they’re best remembered. Less dour than darkly funny, Together wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does without their chemistry. The fact that its two leads are together in real life has a soothing effect during the film’s darkest moments — whatever happens to Tim and Millie, at least Franco and Brie are okay.

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Anyone who found The Substance’s visuals too tame will delight in the visual grotesqueries, just as fans of the Spice Girls will appreciate how seamlessly Shanks works their ballad “2 Become 1” into a pivotal scene. Together’s midnight-movie bona fides are beyond repute, but its humor suggests a cross-genre appeal that’s rare for a movie this proudly disturbing. It’s also a great date-night movie in an “at least we’re doing better than them” kind of way. Codependency is one thing, but convergence is quite another.