In Together, Alison Brie plays a teacher named Millie who moves out of New York with her would-be-musician partner, Tim (Dave Franco), only for ominous things to start unfolding in the countryside where the two of them hope to start the next stage of their lives. We’re still one away from an official trend piece, but Jennifer Lawrence happens to do the exact same thing in the upcoming Die, My Love, down to the rock-and-roll husband and saying good-bye to the city in favor of a quieter place, only to begin spiraling out. But the message is clear: There is no more serious test for a couple than to move to a charming house upstate. And the new spot in Together is plenty inviting, with stained glass and a gorgeous tile-lined shower along with room for a home music studio and plenty of verdant trails nearby. The problem isn’t the house itself so much as the fact that its relative isolation leaves the pair, who’ve been together for a decade, without distractions to drown out the issues they’ve been having. Well, that and the mysterious cavern they end up stuck in while out on a walk one day — a location that is linked to a New Age cult once based in the area and contains a Gigeresque pool whose water triggers a desire for supernatural closeness in couples who drink from it.
Together, which was written and directed by Michael Shanks, caused a stir with its body-horror stylings at an otherwise sedate-sounding Sundance in January. But watching it at sea level, what stands out are the ways in which Brie and Franco, who are married in real life, evoke the familiarity of people who’ve been together long enough to know just how to get on each other’s nerves. The movie lays out the broad strokes of their relationship during their good-bye party, in which we learn that Tim’s music career has faltered, that Millie is perceived to be steering their relationship, and that Tim hasn’t been interested in sex since a tragedy involving his parents. But what makes the couple’s connection feel real and not just like one sketched out for the screen are the more intimate beats, like the way that Millie summons Tim in from the balcony for a toast, an innocuous gesture that he’s nevertheless acutely aware makes him look like he’s being called to heel due to its timing. Millie has been the one pushing for more, while Tim has taken to withholding parts of himself. But rather than just embrace clichés about women wanting commitment and men not wanting to be tied down, Brie and Franco give their characters an extra layer of awareness, playing them as frustrated by the patterns they’ve found themselves falling into yet unable to break free of them.
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The two are good enough to make Together’s half-baked premise work better than it should, with Brie highlighting Millie’s self-consciousness about coming across as smothering, and Franco allowing Tim to be exasperated by his own noncommittal wavering. The uncanny aspects of the film, first seen in a prologue in which a pair of search dogs becomes abnormally obsessed with each other after venturing into the cavern, initially manifest for Millie and Tim as a strange stickiness. Their legs cling as though glued when they wake up after first drinking out of that underground basin, and later their lips stick together painfully during an unexpected snog. This escalates into some increasingly gnarly set pieces in which the pair find themselves unable to separate after more intimate contact and ultimately experience a sort of bonding that goes beyond closeness into the entirely disturbing. But despite its willingness to get weird with the flesh, Together remains fairly tame in terms of its visuals — the much-trailered scene of Brie picking up an electric saw leads not to onscreen splatter but a punch line of an edit. For all that it seems to want to get freaky, Together has nothing on The Substance or Society, movies with which it shares an interest in the malleability of bodies.
This would matter less if the central metaphor felt especially illuminating. But the dichotomy Together presents, of splitting up (Millie wonders “if we love each other or if we’re just used to each other”) or undergoing an extreme version of fusion, doesn’t actually feel like the dilemma most contemporary couples are wrestling with. Together cites Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’s speech about how we began as two-faced, eight-limbed entities until we were split in two by Zeus and doomed to spend our lives looking for our other half. It’s a reference that the movie can’t live up to in terms of concept or visuals, but it’s also a story about soul mates when what Together really skirts around is the question of codependence. Brie and Franco, in providing nuance and texture to Millie and Tim, may actually have worked against a film that would be better off allowing its characters to be in an unhealthy relationship from the beginning — a choice that would make the ending feel more unsetting rather than just a flubbed allegory.
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