By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Dave Franco, Alison Brie and Damon Herriman
Written and directed by Michael Shanks
Neon
TOGETHER is currently playing in theaters nationwide, but it was especially fun to catch it last week at the Fantasia International Film Festival, an event that always draws enthusiastically reactive crowds. In addition to the many moments in which writer/director Michael Shanks expertly compels screams and startled shouts from the audience, his framing of this body-horror saga with a relationship already under stress also provokes sighs and other sounds of recognition from viewers.
Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) have been a couple for a long time, and we first meet them as their life together is undergoing a major upheaval. Millie has accepted a much-desired teaching job in a small town, which means moving out of their apartment in the city and away from all their friends. Tim wants to be supportive, but there’s a telling and awkward moment at their going-away party when Millie proposes to him (she doesn’t have a ring, but the emotion is genuine), and he can’t come up with the right answer. He’s got issues: While Millie is well on her way to achieving her professional goals, he’s still holding on to his fading hopes of success in the music world, and leaving his bandmates behind isn’t helping.
Franco and Brie, married in real life, expertly capture the ebbs and flows of a long-term relationship while enacting one that certainly goes to far more traumatic and horrific places than they have personally experienced. Not long after Tim and Millie move into their secluded new home (though set in Washington State, TOGETHER was filmed in Australia, and this house could be down the road from the one in BRING HER BACK), they decide to go on a hike through the surrounding woods. They wind up trapped by bad luck and bad weather in a cave containing a Lovecraftian pit–one that we’ve already seen in a prologue having a deleterious effect on a couple of dogs. The next morning, they wake up to find themselves joined at their legs by a mysterious substance that leads to a painful separation.
That’s just the beginning of the bizarre, visceral and often cringeworthy incidents in which Shanks takes fleshy metaphors for a codependent relationship to the nth degree. It’s first followed, however, by a setpiece that incorporates no makeup effects but perfectly and strikingly illustrates the effect this strange infection is having on them, involving Millie going on a drive and the way Tim’s body responds in the shower. And then later comes a scene in a bathroom that’s uncomfortable in a couple of different ways and guaranteed to elicit gasps of shocked laughter, with an anatomical reveal whose timing reminded this reviewer, of all things, of the “franks and beans” bit in THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY. (I got to ask Shanks about that after the screening, and he revealed that although his scene wasn’t inspired by MARY, he did bring up the latter when convincing TOGETHER’s producers of how he wanted to present it.)
Making a most impressive feature debut, Shanks–who, like BRING HER BACK’s Philippou brothers, has a background in YouTube shorts–demonstrates a superb command of craft in TOGETHER, and has assembled a sterling group of collaborators. Germain McMicking’s lush and ominous cinematography, Nicholas Dare’s production design that alternates between the homey and the horrific and the unsettled and unsettling score by Cornel Wilczek are all finely tuned to present a recognizable domestic situation twisted and tortured into a nightmare. The bodily contortions and combinations suffered by Tim and Millie will get under your skin too thanks to the prosthetics work by Larry Van Duynhoven and visual effects supervised by Joshua Simmonds.
Even with all the physical warping and fusing–and the extreme measures the couple ultimately undertake to free themselves from it–it’s the emotional dysfunction, as perfectly performed by Franco and Brie, that truly makes TOGETHER land. Perhaps only a real-life couple could bring the sense of shared history, and of combined affection and frustration, that gives all the grotesquerie such an identifiable foundation. What happens to Tim and Millie eventually spirals into the truly outlandish, yet it’s the filmmakers’ and stars’ achievement that TOGETHER remains rooted in very real and personal concerns.
