Together Takes Relationship Boundaries to a Whole New Level
On the surface, it's an indie body horror. Look deeper and you'll find an eye-opening exploration of modern co-dependency.
good.film
4 months ago
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Together opened in cinemas last week, and there's three big reasons we were immediately IN.
Firstly, THAT premise. It's about a couple that literally begin to "fuse together"... talk about fertile ground! Could this be the movie that anyone obsessed with Couples Therapy will be referencing for years? We're itching to know what tone the film takes. Is it a straight up body horror, or more of a twisted romance? Maybe even a dark comedy? (Thrillingly, it's kinda all three).
Second, the film was written and directed by Aussie Michael Shanks, and we love to get behind our local filmmakers (the film was shot in Melbourne too, in just 21 days). Together's his debut feature film, and we hope it's a home run.
Third, when Together premiered at Sundance it generated huge buzz AND sparked a bidding war between massive players like A24, Neon, Apple and Amazon. It was arguably the most talked-about movie of the festival... and that chatter has gotten even louder since the film's been smacked with a lawsuit (more on that below).
We're no legal experts, but we ARE pretty handy at judging the merit of an original film premise. And the closer we looked into Together's genre-defying DNA and "WTF?!" premise, we just HAD to check it out.
Who Directed Together? Michael Shanks
Who Stars in it? Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Damon Herriman
Where Can I See it? Together is out now in Australian cinemas. Get discount movie tickets to see it for less at Event, Village and Hoyts Cinemas right here. We donate $1 from every Good Tix sold to Australian charities.
What's Together really about at its core?
Writer-Director Michael Shanks has said that he was drawn to tell a story about co-dependency. He chose the body-horror mould to try and explore how "our darkest fears about intimacy can manifest", and says that the couple's story slowly emerged during the writing process as he asked himself: "what might we lose by surrendering to another person?"
Together isn't an extreme horror (think Saw) that uses physical effects purely for shock. It's much more keen on examining the social construct of relationships: how we balance our individual selves (and goals) when we're in love, what healthy co-dependency looks like, and what that can turn into when the balance goes horribly wrong.
Shanks sets the action somewhere isolated, of course (remember Get Out's creepy drive into the woods? Same vibes). Millie, played by Alison Brie, gets a great new teaching job, but it's in a remote small-town. No friends, no family, hours away from anywhere they know. Tim (played by Brie's husband Dave Franco) tags along, because as a musician he doesn't have a full time job or really any other ties. That's the first hint that this relationship isn't exactly 50/50... and what they're about to go through puts the nagging differences between them to the ultimate test.
How does Together explore ideas like emasculation?
There's early hints that Tim & Millie's relationship isn't exactly bulletproof. During the farewell party at the beginning of the film, Tim gets an invite from his muso mates to go on tour with them as a backup guitarist, and we can tell he's WAY more amped about that dream than following his girlfriend to the middle of nowhere.
In the other room, Millie's bestie asks if Tim's stepped up in the romance stakes yet - he hasn't made love with her in months. Something's off. Watch how Millie defends Tim though: he doesn't have a stable job and he doesn't seem that committed, but when her friends hint that Millie could do better, she backs her partner because that's what partners do. But each piece of logic seems to chip away at Millie's surety. Is she defending him because he's Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now?
For Tim, he's battling a string of knocks to his ego - actually, more to his maleness. There's the low libido for a start, code for you're not a "real man" unless you're virile. Millie's the breadwinner while he's a gigging musician whose "big break" is still vaguely on its way. There's other hints too: he's useless with power tools and doesn't have a drivers' licence, so he relies on Millie to take him places. When it comes to gender roles, he's literally in the passenger seat.
The last piece of emasculation is when Millie pauses the party music and SHE gets on one knee to propose. Perhaps she's sensing Tim's distance and wants to lock him down. But it makes their confusing relationship worse: Tim pauses horribly, the mood gets REAL awkward, and it's yet another "man thing" that Millie, arguably, has "taken" from Tim. It means their move to the countryside starts with a heap of question marks. Are they even all that compatible? And if their relationship's that fragile, how will they cope when it's really put to the test?
Together takes things deeper with a look at grief and purpose
Shanks quickly kicks the film into gear when Tim & Millie get stuck outdoors on a weekend trek, spending the night in an abandoned cave with some creepy undertones that we won't spoil. Maybe not the ideal date night, but it actually gives them a chance to talk over their conflicts, and dig deeper into what's been keeping them so distant.
That's where we get a bit more backstory about Tim and the traumatic loss of both his parents (in a few quick and impactful cuts, we immediately get why it still haunts him so viscerally). Suddenly the pieces fall into place; no wonder he's disengaged, anxious, and uninterested in sex. His grief has kind of emptied him out, making him happy to follow his partner just to make sense of himself. If you've seen Ari Aster's Midsommar, you'll recognise the emotional beats.
Watch out for the scene where Millie is welcomed to the neighbourhood by her colleague Jamie (Damon Herriman) with a house visit and a bottle of wine. Tim immediately senses Jamie's eye on his fiancee, and it boils up a slight panic in him. You can almost hear his thoughts: What if she falls in love with him? What if she leaves me? What will I have left? Who will I be?
It's great, because Tim's grief-jealousy-self-doubt combo means when creepy scenes inevitably start to happen, we're never on sure ground as to whether it's just his fractious mental state at play, or something more supernatural is going on. One morning, he wakes up choking on Millie's long hair. In another scene, she leaves for a drive and he has a violent seizure in the shower. And what was up with that weird, sticky substance that melted their legs together in the cave...?
The duality of the situation is so clever (because hey, there's always two sides in a relationship). Through Tim's eyes, bizarre things are happening, he's frightened, and he's relying on Millie to be his support structure and sympathiser. From Millie's point of view though, her "boy partner" is crumbling: he's turning into a panicked, sweaty conspiracist; a troubled weirdo when what she really needs is a stable, reliable partner. In other words? A proper man.
What's the deal with Together being hit with a lawsuit?
In May, film company NEON and Michael Shanks were sued by another filmmaker, Patrick Henry Phelan, who claims that the concept (and even specific plot points) were stolen from his 2023 indie film Better Half, which ALSO has the central idea of a couple becoming physically fused. Bit of a coincidence, no? Even more curiously, Phelan actually pitched his script to real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who he claims turned him down, then copied his ideas. Shanks hit back, asserting that his Together screenplay was already registered with the Writers Guild of America way back in 2019. Standby for who emerges the winner in THAT arm wrestle.
What’s the takeaway from Together?
How fine is the line between mutual support and toxic attachment? That's the key question Together wants us mulling over as we exit a movie that ends with, it has to be said, one of the most impressive physical effects transformations since Jeff Goldblum turned into The Fly.
In this case though, it's not played for vomitous reax - in fact, the whole scene is backed by a syrupy Spice Girls love song that's got to be one of the most sarcastic and funny needle drops of 2025. There's something deeply romantic, and deeply horrifying, going on at the same time. How often can you say that?!
Ultimately, Together is an absorbing and super original reflection on modern relationships. How we balance them, how we keep them intimate, and how we maintain a healthy independence within them. The physical fusion is a metaphor, of course: as much as we might long to be totally united with someone we love, seeing it happen in bodily form is a seriously revolting notion.
But the provocation is the point. Think of the conversations that exploded after The Substance went to fish-eyed extremes to make us rethink women's beauty standards. Together has every chance of sparking the same kind of deep conversations: this time about co-dependency and blurred boundaries. Oh, and who's really best at handling a power saw.
Together is out now in Australian cinemas. Get discount movie tickets to see it for less at Event, Village and Hoyts Cinemas right here. We donate $1 from every Good Tix sold to Australian charities.
