Together: Alison Brie and James Franco find funny, skin-crawling horror in a love that binds

Horror movies so often arrive packaged as being ‘about’ something that it ’s easy to tune out the latest arts-feature-ready blurb. But Michael Shanks’s Together – a funny, skin-crawling yarn about a couple who get too close for comfort – zeroes in on co-dependence and passive aggression in relationships with an appealing gusto that perhaps only married stars could bring.

Alison Brie and Dave Franco star as Tim and Millie, who are not married but have been together for many years. They finally make some sort of leap of faith by moving to the countryside for Millie’s new teaching job, after a cringeworthy going-away party lays out the loudly tick-

ing clock of their commitment issues. Life at their remote new home is sunny and green but also, following a hike that strands them into a water-logged oubliette-like cave, increasingly bizarre.

As Millie settles into work and Tim struggles as a musician, the movie’s unholy mechanism kicks into gear. Tim experiences a kind of uncanny body-mirroring of Millie’s movements around the area; but the film’s main attraction is the pair’s growing tendency to get physically attached, literally: they wake one morning with their limbs adhering to one other. Shanks, writing and directing his first feature, ramps up the menace of this affliction nicely, and it ’s at once confusing, frightening and mesmerising to the couple as a form, however gnarly, of renewed desire.

Tim’s jealousy toward an attentive neighbour stirs the pot, and the movie settles into an effective tango between obsessive drives and loss of control. The elastic VFX for when the couple get stuck together are unnerving and lightly gross-out without throwing the film’s sense of fun off balance (or getting too self-consciously gonzo, à la 2024’s The Substance). That’s also down to the comedy chops of Brie and Franco, who thrive on the film’s dysfunctional-love-as-deadly-Twister-game premise.

Tim and Millie’s interplay is morbidly absorbing so that when a cult story thread emerges from the tangle, it feels almost unnecessary. The crowd at the festival screening I attended were responding to the film beat by beat, which adds to the fun (and may help explain its acquisition for an eye-popping $17 million). The metaphor of attachment finally isn’t just about visualising co-dependence; what gets under your skin is Tim and Millie’s fear that they’re forgetting how to be close at all.

► Together is in UK cinemas now.