Body horror has been enjoying a renaissance, and that was even before Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance nabbed the Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the 97th Academy Awards and earned star Demi Moore a nomination for Best Actress. When Moore receives her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Elisabeth Sparkle blobs will inevitably appear as fan tributes, an undeniable declaration that grotesque glamor has become mainstream. So for writer/director Michael Shanks, who has been working for the better part of six years to bring his debut feature Together to life, there’s never been a better time to dare to ask the question: What happens when your relationship literally devours you?
Alison Brie and Dave Franco — a real-life couple who effortlessly fall into their roles — star as Millie and Tim, a couple in their 30s who have never really experienced adulthood without the other in their life. Millie has recently accepted a job as a grade-school teacher in a small, woodsy town, forcing her musician boyfriend to decide if now is when he finally graduates out of this stage of arrested development or enters a new one full of resentment. Millie and Tim clearly love one another, but they’re going through a bit of a rough patch and are hoping for a fresh start in their picturesque new home, much larger than anything they could have ever afforded if they had stayed in the big city. But their new home harbors a horror more unfathomable than the witnessed tragedy Tim has been letting consume him for years.
After falling into a nightmare grotto with pews embedded into the walls and drinking from a bizarre pool of water, the couple is plagued by their bodies’ uncontrollable urge to fuse together into a single unit, as if the shunting in Society started involuntarily happening. As Millie and Tim desperately try to keep their distance, the infection thrusts their bodies and minds into a stretching, squelching frenzy.
Franco is best known by the general public for his work in comedy films, but he’s a diehard horror fan who seems to use his big-budget studio checks to fund experimental genre work like his directorial debut, The Rental, also starring Brie (and featured in Fangoria Vol 2. Issue #8). Despite being famous for roughly the last two decades, Franco absolutely nails the guarded, grieving Tim, a frustrated creative refusing to accept that his musician dreams aren’t going to come true, and that he’s spent his entire adulthood wishing on a dead star. He’s the perfect balance for Brie’s commanding performance as Millie, whose work keeps the tonal plates of Shanks’ script from crashing to the ground. As a school teacher, Millie is blessed with the ability to express her emotions with exasperation and empathy, but it’s clear she’s exhausted from years of having to be the adult all the time, and suffering through it all without orgasms to boot! When things escalate to a level beyond comprehension, it’s only because Millie has reached the limit of what she can withstand.
Shanks has a clear love for the body horror films of yesteryear, with touches of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, and Stuart Gordon sprinkled throughout, but instead of presenting a cheap mash-up of the subgenre’s greatest hits, he’s delivered a quirky millennial rom-com that trades twee needle drops for Alison Brie’s primal screaming, and that swaps a scene of holding hands at sunset with one starring a reciprocating saw and a pound of fleshy arm skin. Somehow, Shanks successfully blends schlock with sentimentality and a sense of humor that makes it easier to giggle and squirm through our collective discomfort. In the same way that the grotesquerie of The Thing is the physical manifestation of collective paranoia, the writhing limbs and distorted frames represent a physical manifestation of codependency, unresolved trauma, and emotional stagnation.
As a seasoned VFX artist, Shanks combines digital artistry with some truly fantastic prosthetics and practical effects — the gooey, putrid, and disturbingly tactile creations of Larry Van Duynhoven and Scarecrew Studios, the same talented sickos behind the horrors of The Phillipou Brothers’ Bring Her Back. But Together doesn’t tack on the body horror as some sort of tired gimmick; it’s the cinematic language that this story demands to be told in. The gross-out effects work as well as they do because they match the overwhelming level of emotion. When you love someone, I mean truly love them, trying to explain to another person what that feels like in your body is an impossibility, so it’s only fitting that their bodies contort in impossible ways to tell the audience how much they love each other. Bashful teens and dating game show hosts refer to sex as “making love,” an action that allows bodies to be as physically close to one another as possible, filling orifices to make us whole.
No matter what troubles Tim and Millie face, their bodies keep the score. Shanks has crafted a rare film that captures the brutal honesty of what it feels like to love someone so much you physically ache for them, but isn’t afraid to laugh at how vulnerable and disgusting it is to be in love.
Together is totally fucked up, but it’s also totally romantic.
