‘Babe’ is a term of endearment that can have a lot of uses. For real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who star as long-term, not-yet-married couple Tim and Millie in their new horror film, it can be wielded with passive-aggression, gooey pleading, or clingy apology; the pair use ‘babe’ so much it’s basically meaningless.
Tim and Millie are on the verge of a move from city to country as Millie takes on a new teaching job; we find them at a difficult crossroads, with a moratorium on sex and a growing distance between them. Tim is rudderless, ageing out of his dreams of success as a musician while Millie is pragmatic and high-achieving; to make matters worse, Tim is also recovering from a traumatic incident, haunted by the memories of discovering his father’s badly decomposed corpse. The pair put a cheerful facade over their uncertainties, but their move only seems to increase tension – especially when, on a hiking trip in the nearby woods, they stumble into a seemingly manmade cave and find themselves infected by a strange medical condition. They cannot, seemingly, be physically apart.
The metaphor is not subtle, but it is deployed with delicious and surprising twists nonetheless: when Millie gets in the car, Tim’s catatonic body throws itself violently against the wall as if to mimic her movement. When Tim closes himself behind his office door late at night, Millie drags herself from bed, zombifies, and headbutts it. A kiss makes their lips stick painfully together; sex does much worse.
Bone-cracking and fleshy and disgusting in all the most satisfying ways a body horror should be, Together gets its visual effects right, and it utilises them gradually and sometimes very drolly. ‘What are we, running a fucking three-legged race?’ Franco shouts when he awakes to find his girlfriend’s calf stuck to his.
A kiss makes their lips stick painfully together; sex does much worse
The pair fight and rationalise and theorise, but eventually it becomes clear: they must fight every urge to commingle or else their bodies and perhaps souls will merge forever, turning them into what we can only assume will be some unholy, soupy conjoined twin. Their unassuming, friendly next door neighbour Jamie (Damon Herriman) remarks at a dinner that another couple has gone missing in their local woods; whatever this freakish or perhaps occult force is, it seems to be incurable and even deadly.
The film has its weak points, including an early monologue about the smell of death that feels telegraphed. There are some visual choices or shots that are clangingly obvious, and the ending skews more silly than troubling.
But overall Together’s emotional and narrative power is mesmeric, and it finds much to say within its unpleasant metaphor of two sets of bones, skin and sinew sticking like glue to one another. It never overstates its (already obvious) case: clinginess and romantic codependency often crop up when a relationship is at its most discomfiting, when fear of loss starts to set in, when one party seems to be drifting from the other. And, naturally, it hurts all the more when Tim and Millie resist the pull: they might know it’s better to break apart, to break up, to remain whole and separate. But removing themselves from that loved one’s orbit – or resisting the ache of muscle memory that literally yearns for their skin in contact – feels impossible. And now their bodies have made it impossible.
It’s a wonderfully rich gambit for talking about the push and pull of long-term commitment; of the fine line between complacency and wilful denial; and of the bonds of love that can remain intact regardless of your own toxicity. The fact that Brie and Franco are married in real life gives such heft, intimacy, and emotional power to what could be ridiculous; instead, you truly feel their dismay, their shifting mutual moods, their defensiveness with one another. You feel it when they dance together to the Spice Girls.
Ultimately, for better or for worse, you feel their sticky, fleshy, monstrous, codependent love.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 15. In US theaters now.