Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is once again out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Check out our preview of the 2025 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full 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’ Together 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’t know where one person in the relationship begins and where the other person ends up — only, this time, it’s fully literal.
Tim (Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are taking a big step: They’ve 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’s a huge change for Tim, and it’s one coming at a bad time — his parents died a short time before the film began, and he’s been suffering from an acute depression. But he wants to support his girlfriend (she wants to get married, but he’s nervous), so he agreed to the move, even if it meant having to take a train into the city to play in gigs. He’s a grown-ass man bumming rides, and Millie knows he’s 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 She loves him anyway, even as the loss seems to make him more withdrawn.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’t 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.
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 “mildew” 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’s not around. He starts showing up at her work at inopportune times, abandoning shows he’s scheduled to play, and finds himself doing strange shit while he’s sleeping. At first, Millie’s just glad he’s 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’s going on with the pair. But whatever’s 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.
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’re great at sharing co-protagonist duties, and they’re fiercely committed to the reality of the film: There’s 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’ 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’re 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).
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.
Yet Together 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. There are some incredibly gross images here — one large yuck comes when Franco sleep-eats Brie’s hair while they sleep in their shared bed, with about a foot of it trapped in his throat when he’s 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 “merging,” with all of its under-skin bone crawling and snapping.
It’s a swell debut for Shanks, and it’s 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’s just his secret sauce in current moment: Body horror is what the people want in Park City, and Franco’s steadily becoming the patron saint of the midnight portion of the program.