Together: Alison Brie and Dave Franco Really Are a Horror Power Couple

Real life couples playing big screen lovers has been a fascination for audiences since the days of Fairbanks and Pickford, Tracy and Hepburn, Cruise and Kidman. How much of what we are watching is indicative of the real-life dynamic between these two performers? Do they love like that, lean on the other’s shoulder in the same way when the camera stops rolling? And is that quarrel real or just Kubrick wreaking havoc on two people’s personal lives? 

There is plenty of precedent in the uncanny valley through which writer-director Michael Shanks enters via his debut feature Together—a movie that casts Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie, a co-dependent couple doomed to get a lot closer in what either amounts to the most disturbing of body horror nightmares… or a swoon-worthy alternative rom-com, depending on your disposition. (Or fetish.) Franco and Brie have been one of the millennial cool kids power couples since the days of appearing alongside one another in Funny or Die web videos back in 2013, and Together leans into that, with the pair now playing those hipsters of a certain age that a NEON audience in New York or Portland, or Austin might recognize.

Tim and Millie were the king and queen of Bushwick back in the day who have now entered their mid(ish) 30s. Nevertheless, Franco’s Tim still is seen clinging to his vinyl record collection in the character’s introductory shot. He’s also moping because his significant other wants to move upstate to the country for a teaching position at an elementary school—and just when he’s sure his music career is about to take off. In other words, the coolness has curdled. 

I have no idea how much if any of the real-life Brie and Franco are synthesized into these characters—and I’d hope very little, given the characters’ varying degrees of toxicity—but they represent a phenomenon that is both timeless and indicative of a particular generation that has struggled with “adulting,” even after all these years. Which makes their ultimately Cronenbergian predicament in Together both terrifying and deliciously sadistic. 

Out in the woods and beyond their new home, there is a cavelike hole in the ground, and the insides of that chasm would not look out of place in a story written by H.P. Lovecraft or John Carpenter. After all, this place was inhabited once by someone. Just look at those monstrously destroyed church pews and the perverse, ritualistic bells dangling from the rock face. There is also a pool of water in the center of the ruin. After Tim and Millie get stranded there during a rainstorm, Tim proves he’s still perhaps too eager to try strange beverages from anywhere. Like a younger man, he thinks his system can handle whatever is placed in front of him.

But after indulging in the water, what Tim’s body increasingly seems drawn toward isn’t food or sleep; it’s Millie. The more he touches her, the more she in turn cannot resist holding him, even after she’s told him she’d rather he not be there when her parents visit this coming weekend. Finally one morning, after a long overdue fight, the couple realizes their arms are welded together with the skin seamlessly shared on top. Unfortunately neither of their bodies’ physiological desires is satisfied with only holding hands.

With its appropriately wicked premise, Together is clearly playing a lot with perception and the sense of identity a couple can have after years or decades of being a unit. Tim and Millie are beyond just the monotony of life’s daily indignities and rigmaroles; theirs is an unhealthy marriage, if in name only (he never proposed and flinches when she does at the start of the movie). They’re the types who are perhaps together because they no longer remember a life without the other being unfailingly present.

Such dependency has bred an obvious resentment that will be familiar to many audiences, but it also makes their plight both grotesque and obliquely amusing in the manner of an old world parable or Grimm fairytale. There is a certain moralistic sense of cosmic punishment about the two being forced to come together, quite literally and with increasingly gnarly and satirical side effects.

Yet the reason the movie is a cut above the typical body horror gross-out is because Shanks doesn’t just frame this story as a cautionary tale; he also sees it as what might be best described as the newest of New Age couple’s therapies. By giving an unhappy yet otherwise likable pair of protagonists a common problem, the film operates as an oddly romantic film about rekindling old sparks, and finding new appreciation for the significant other, even if it is just Tim’s gratitude that Millie is willing to operate the power tool that will separate their arms.

The film’s greatest attribute remains, however, casting real-life husband and wife Franco and Brie as fictional doppelgängers. While much can be said about the metaphor of Tim and Millie’s problematic hang-ups with one another, it is still a vehicle for a real-life romance to channel years of shorthand and trust into more than chemistry; it’s utter confidence and intuition about the other player in what is essentially a two-hander picture. Both actors have made careers out of not only being preternaturally attractive, but also game for self-deprecation and a sometimes deliberate gangliness (#SixSeasonsandaMovie, remember?). 

There’s a lack of vanity to how Tim and Millie relate to each other and in performances that are brimming with affection, even when the screenplay requires them to say the most ruthless things. It’s a darted glance of sincere admiration in Brie’s eyes which makes it actually funny when she and Franco are snorting muscle relaxers off a floor in a panicked bid for survival. Their desperation to prevent other unwanted intimacies is dark, but it’s the actors’ comfort with one another that elicits not only a chuckle but also something approaching unexpected warmth, like discovering a campfire in the Arctic. Or perhaps a mysterious, inviting pool in the bowels of the earth.

Together is definitely a horror movie with sequences that earn gasps and titters of nervous laughter. Yet it’s Brie and Franco’s authenticity that turn it into a surprisingly wholesome date movie. In every meaning of the term.

Together is in theaters now.