"Together" Review

While it's tempting to suggest that the body horror genre pretty much begins and ends with the work of David Cronenberg (Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, Crimes of the Future, to name a few) there are other practitioners such as Michael Shanks who makes his directorial debut with Together, which asks the question, how close is too close to be with someone?

Real-life married couple Allison Brie (GLOW, Community) and Dave Franco (Now You See Me, James' little brother) star as Millie and Tim, a young couple leaving New York City for her to start a job at an unnamed upstate elementary school. They've been dating for years, but never married and when she attempts to propose at their going away party in front of their friends, he freezes on answering, causing major embarrassment. He's struggling with having to functionally give up on his music career to follow her to the sticks, but he's going nowhere though accepts a touring guitarist gig with a friend's band.

While trying to get acclimated to the area, they go for a hike, get lost in a rainstorm, and fall into a cavern in the woods. With night falling, they decide to stay and lacking water, Tim drinks from a pool in the cave; a pool we saw a pair of dogs drink from in a prologue and suffer horrific effects. When they wake up, they find their calves stuck together which he attributes to mildew.

Afterwards, he begins to experience weird dreams and an overwhelming attraction to Millie (yes, Brie is attractive but not with the bad bangs hairstyle she's sporting here) and contact between them results in more things sticking together. Soon, she's being drawn to him leading to a scene where they're sleepcrawling towards each other, awaking in time to partially succeed in not getting totally stuck on each other, though a sabre saw is required to, well, you get the idea.

The reason for their fusing and a mysterious New Agey church/cult centered on the cavern, which was the chapel before sinking into the earth isn't really explained and it begs a lot of questions about just how close you really need to be to your partner. The ending - which I unfortunately had spoiled - could be a shark-jumping moment for some, like the horror fan missus who flipped from kinda liking it to "What the hell was that?"-ing it in the end.

I don't think it adds up to much despite grazing on some interesting ideas about relationships. The house they're living in seems waaaaaay too large for a teacher to afford and more space than they need. If feels like Shanks wanted to make a movie about a couple sticking together, literally, then sprinkled some details around it to make it seem more substantive without quite succeeding.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.