Ever fear you're losing yourself in a relationship? Or maybe that you're less living together — and more stuck together? This fear of intimacy manifests into a physical horror in Together, the latest film from real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco.
Among the pair's previous collaborations was The Rental, an underseen thriller co-written and directed by Franco, which followed two couples (Brie included) on a weekend getaway gone very wrong. While Together puts both husband and wife in front of the camera for a new nightmare written and helmed by Michael Shanks in his feature debut, the films have slow-burn scares in common.
With The Rental, the fear came from the creeping certainty that someone was watching the unsuspecting couples as they frolicked and fought in the rented vacation house. With Together, the terror gets under your skin early — thanks to a creepy opening sequence involving two poor doomed dogs, which gives the audience a hint of what's to befall the central duo before they've even come onscreen.
The resulting body horror and its psychological underpinnings had critics out of Together's Sundance premiere giddy, earning the thriller a 100-percent Rotten Tomatoes rating ahead of its theatrical release. But can Together live up to the festival hype?
Together is a skin-crawling tale of a relationship on the rocks.
Shanks introduces Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) in a moment of transition. The long-term couple is unmarried, but making a big move from New York City to upstate, where Millie has an exciting new job as a teacher at a good school. So they're throwing a going-away party, at which struggling musician Tim feels less like a partner and more like a parasite.
Upstate, where the woods are lush and the folks are nosy, could be a fresh start. But while Millie has a job and new friends, Tim feels aimless and trapped. And that's before a fateful hike changes his flesh so that it inexplicably conjoins with Millie's at any opportunity. First, their shins stick together as if glued after they fall asleep side by side. Later, a kiss will feel like a bite as their lips blend. Eventually, an attempt to reconnect through sex gets viciously sticky, turning violent. Before long, power tools will come into play to keep them separated.
Basically, while Millie and Tim debate whether they want to figure out how to become better partners or break up, their skin is desperate to pull them together. Figuring out why this is happening becomes a quest for the couple, but answers aren't the point.
Ghoulish voyeurism plays into Together.
Body horror is a subgenre that thrives on our repulsion and our gnarly desire to not look away. On this front, Shanks delivers. As teased in the eerie ad campaign, the flesh of Tim and Millie will collide and meld in ways uniquely heinous. It's a grisly thrill to witness. But because of the cast, there's a meta level of gawking as well.
Because Franco and Brie are married in real life, their onscreen kisses, collisions, and fights all bristle with the possibility of blurred lines. What here is purely performance, and what in this toxic partnership is them pulling from their real-life relationship? The answer is, of course, none of our business. But both Franco and Brie are too savvy not to realize that this nosiness of imagination is part of the film's inherent allure.
Onscreen they have undeniable chemistry. But as Tim and Millie fight, the ferocity is all the more rattling because we know they're portrayed by a real-life couple. It gooses the stakes crudely. It suggests the film has an intimacy that edges into illicit intrusion, whether or not that's illusion. And that's a useful tool, as Together is otherwise a good, but not great, horror movie.
Together can't compare to what the past year has offered in terms of horror.
To the credit of Shanks, what he has scripted is a compelling tale of co-dependency with a mix of the occult and body horror. Together is a wickedly entertaining movie. But watching it in the wake of The Substance, Sinners, Bring Her Back, and 28 Years Later, it's not a winner, but an also-ran.
Props to Together's special effects team, who created the nightmarish realism that has Brie's fingers snaking up under the skin of Franco's forearm. But this feels tame after Coralie Fargeat's Academy Award–nominated The Substance transformed Hollywood sex symbols Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley into a monstrosity in a ballgown. The twisted tale of what Tim and Millie would do for love is satisfyingly gnarly. But it pales in comparison to the blood-drenched frenzy of Ryan Coogler's vampire lovers in Sinners. And while Together is slow-burn creepy with its icky reveals and putrid possession sequences, it can't shake us up like the Philippou Brothers' demonic psycho-biddy thriller, Bring Her Back, or Danny Boyle's epic zombie horror, 28 Years Later.
Perhaps it seems unfair to compare Shanks' indie directorial debut to the works of more established and heralded filmmakers. But because of all the Sundance buzz, even as I watched Together's supremely gruesome climax, I was a bit bereft, hungering for something more.
While The Substance awed us last fall, 2025 has been a banner year for horror. So between January, when Together was impressing Sundance critics, and its release now, audiences have been wowed by visions of horror that defy genre expectations by working in musical numbers, turning Paddington's adopted mom into a monster, and delivering a coming-of-age story exploding with ghouls imagined and all too real.
In the end, even with my appreciation for The Rental, Brie and Franco's freaky follow-up just didn't hit as hard as I'd hoped. Still, Together is a twisted ride that's sure to give you goosebumps.
