Film Review: Together 長相黐守 (2025) - USA
Rating: ★★★★☆ (8/10)
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
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Tagline: What is it about romantic entanglement that makes such fertile, terrifying ground for horror?
Cinema keeps reminding us: love can be the ultimate nightmare. Michael Shanks’ sharp, startling debut feature “Together" understands this primal fear intimately. It asks a question that chills the bone: What if the secure relationship you fought for becomes the very thing tearing you apart?
Real-life partners (and producers) Alison Brie and Dave Franco bring unnerving authenticity to Millie and Tim, a couple clinging to hope as their shared path crumbles. Millie, securing a teaching job in the country, represents pragmatic forward motion. Tim, a musician perpetually on the cusp of a breakthrough sustained by her faith (and finances), embodies fading dreams. Their move to a rural fixer-upper isn't just a change of address; it's a desperate, white-knuckled attempt to salvage them. Franco masterfully conveys Tim's quiet crisis – the dawning realization that the 'big break' might be a myth, mirrored heartbreakingly in his hesitant, public "Yes" when Millie unexpectedly proposes. The dread is palpable before the first creak in the floorboard.
Shanks builds character with efficient grace. We know these people, their unspoken resentments, their fragile hopes. Then, the horror creeps in. A discovery in the attic ceiling, a reciprocating saw left conspicuously handy... Chekhov would nod grimly. A hiking trip leads to a freak accident, trapping them overnight in a cave that feels less like shelter and more like the gullet of some primordial beast. It's here, parched and desperate, that Tim drinks from a well he knows he shouldn't. Isn't that love? Doing the irrevocably foolish thing for the person you can't imagine being without?
What follows is a masterclass in escalating bodily terror. Tim begins suffering grotesque, bone-snapping seizures that bizarrely reignite their physical connection – culminating in a bathroom stall tryst that’s equal parts horrifying and darkly hilarious. The pull between them becomes literal, visceral, a Cronenbergian nightmare of shared flesh and splintered bone. Shanks orchestrates the transformation with nods to “The Thing” and more recently “The Substance” - body-horror films, but the true spectacle is Franco and Brie. Their commitment is total, physically wrenching, selling every excruciating twist and gooey merger with astonishing, often nauseating, conviction. Damon Herriman provides crucial, unsettling counterpoint as Jamie, the neighbor whose kindness masks an unnerving curiosity about the couple's increasingly bizarre suffering.
“Together" thrives on its central, brilliant perversity: using extreme body horror to visualize the terrifying intimacy and painful merging inherent in deep commitment. Where do you end and they begin? Shanks maps this emotional decay onto the physical with grotesque invention. While the plot mechanics of the cave's influence might feel familiar to genre devotees by the climax, the journey there is so fiercely acted, so sharply observed about relationship dynamics, and so audaciously realized in its practical and visual effects, that it transcends its influences.
This is a film best experienced raw, like the nerves it exposes. It understands that enduring love isn't just shared joy; it's surviving the string of questionable decisions, the moments where you lose yourself in the other, sometimes literally. Finding out if Tim and Millie possess that brutal, necessary commitment is as cutting, as suspenseful, and ultimately, as strangely rewarding as love itself. Horror has rarely felt so painfully, grotesquely human. (Neo 2025)