‘Together’ Review: Dave Franco and Alison Brie in a Bonkers but Wildly Fun Fusion of Body Horror and Codependency Angst

The bodily mutations in The Substance left you wanting more? Well, has Australian writer-director Michael Shanks got a movie for you, with more bone-crunching contortions, sticky goop and subcutaneous disturbance than you could dream of. Not to mention supernatural cult craziness. Dave Franco and Alison Brie are terrific playing a codependent couple going through a troubled patch while moving to a small town where the woods hide ghastly secrets. When Brie’s schoolteacher Millie early on suggests in exasperation that maybe it would be better to split up now rather than later when it’s more painful, she has no idea how prophetic those words will be.

It’s hard to say much about the freaky blast of body horror romance that is Together without wading into spoiler territory, but a syrupy Spice Girls hit from 1996 provides clues. As does a prologue in which searchers comb the lush forest — regional Victoria, Australia, a bit distractingly recognizable in the role of the Pacific Northwest — for two missing hikers.

A pair of sniffer dogs venture down into a cavernous pit where some kind of insidious entity seems to be watching them from below as they lap up water from an underground pool. When they re-emerge, the pooches start exhibiting unsettling behavior, standing stock still facing each other with eyes locked together. They get even closer that night, when their owner finds them snarling, with their bloodied faces fused together like some kind of two-headed beast.

Given that Together is soon established as being about a couple trying to repair and strengthen their bond, that image doesn’t bode well.

The creepiness of the pre-title sequence dissipates in some sluggish dysfunctional relationship set-up, as Millie prepares to leave the city for a hopefully more fulfilling teaching position at a small school in the sticks. While her struggling musician partner Tim (Franco) has grown more distant lately, she puts him on the spot by proposing at their going-away party. His hesitation before saying “Yes” embarrasses her and creates more tension, suggesting that he’s not so keen on the move. But he finds a space for himself when Millie’s brother Luke (Jack Kenny) invites Tim to join his band on tour as guitarist.

Since Millie needs the car for work and Tim can’t drive, that will involve taking the train in and out of the city. As a plan to stop Tim from feeling like a useless appendage attached to his more career-oriented other half, it seems worth a try. Except that Tim, whose nightmares reveal trauma in his past, doesn’t get that far.

They move into a spacious house in the cozy town, and we immediately get a queasy “Chekhov’s gun” signal when Tim unpacks an electric saw that belonged to his father, telling Millie, “Don’t let me use this.” Millie is welcomed at the school, perhaps a bit too eagerly, by fellow teacher Jamie (Damon Herriman), who tells her about the beautiful woodlands and great hiking trails in the area. He neglects to mention the couple that went missing and have not been found, or the hippie religious sect chapel that collapsed into the forest ground.

Even if you can see what’s coming next in the more predictable stretch of the movie, the mood remains ominous as they follow a trail marked by ornate brass bells. While trying to find shelter during a torrential rainstorm, they end up falling through ground cover into the dreaded pit. And since they are low on bottled water, Tim drinks from the pool, telling Millie the water tastes fine. Bad move. The rain keeps them stuck there overnight, and they wake up to find the outer sides of their legs glued together by some kind of gooey webbing, strong enough to make separation painful.

At that point, director Shanks is in his devilishly playful element, while Brie and Franco throw themselves full force into a scenario that keeps getting weirder. Not least when Tim finally breaks the sexual drought between them in a school restroom, glueing them together in an intimate way that prompted the packed Sundance audience to scream with laughter and shuddering recoil. Men, you will clutch your genitals.

In a visceral earlier scene, we get a hint of the magnetic pull between them as Millie drives to work while Tim finds himself being violently slammed around the shower stall at home by an invisible force. A local doctor (Aljin Abella) prescribes Diazepam, diagnosing the problem as an anxiety-induced seizure.

Things just keep getting stickier from then on, and it becomes clear that unctuous Jamie knows more than he’s letting on. (Herriman keeps the maniacal menace just below the surface, at least for now.) While waiting for the train into the city, Tim’s popping, twitching muscles turn him into a virtual zombie, uncontrollably drawn toward Millie. He tries to explain it later, saying, “It’s like my brain and my body aren’t talking.”

Shanks gets more and more inventive with the gruesome set-pieces as any kind of contact between Tim and Millie turns adhesive and every effort to keep a safe distance transforms them into puppets, dragged together across the floor and prone to self-harm when separated.

Real-life couple Brie and Franco bring great gusto and personal investment to the hair-raising (or at one point, -eating) Cronenbergian ordeal they find themselves stuck in, which fortifies the underlying themes of codependency, commitment phobia and the fear of losing oneself in a relationship, intensifying when a couple’s existence is more isolated. To what extent is it healthy for loving partners to imprint themselves on each other?

But Shanks never lets the relationship drama intrude too much on the demented “pleasures” of the stretchy flesh, mining humor throughout from such things as social media banality, gay weddings, the uses of muscle relaxants against occult forces and, of course, that electric saw. It’s refreshing to see a horror movie that relies less on shock tactics than good old-fashioned dread and revulsion.

The movie’s final escalation slaps on the prosthetic disfigurements to hilarious gross-out effect, almost making you wonder if Demi Moore might be somewhere inside all the writhing elasticized skin. (For the record, Together was in the works before The Substance premiered.) It’s a nice touch that amid all the shock and awe about their physical transformations, Millie and Tim find the means to reaffirm their mutual commitment, which yields an uproarious — and deftly executed — sight gag in the closing shot.

Shanks could stand to develop more finesse (and better writing) in the emotional drama. But even if he’s killing time in his first feature before letting loose a heap of corporeal mayhem, Together marks him as a talent to watch. It’s an ideal midnight date movie for the non-squeamish.