Losing oneself has both positive and negative connotations. To lose oneself, say, in a good book is one of life’s greatest pleasures, while the loss of self—that is, one’s own identity and personhood—is one of its greatest terrors. For Michael Shanks, the depersonalization engendered by long-term relationships is both frightening and a comfort, and it’s given squelchy, scary, utterly romantic expression in Together, his feature directorial debut.
Millie (Allison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) find their decade-long relationship put to the test by a move to the countryside after Millie takes a job at an elementary school and Tim continues to hold onto his dream of being a musician. During a freak rainstorm while hiking in the woods surrounding their new home, they stumble into a pit, and as they wait for the storm to subside, Tim takes a drink from a nearby pool of water. In the days after hauling themselves out of the pit, a strange force keeps drawing Tim and Millie back to each other physically, with their skin and limbs painfully fused together, despite the growing emotional distance between them.
Shanks so smartly foregrounds the dynamics of the film’s central relationship, and Brie and Franco’s real-life chemistry lends authenticity to the proceedings, that it’s easy to forgive Together when certain elements don’t quite come, well, together. The quandaries that Millie and Tim face as a couple who are unsure whether they’re still in love or just used to each other are sharply relatable, and watching them navigate the landscape of resentments, regrets, and uncertainties that a decade has built between them is tough and heartening.
Shanks’s screenplay tips its hat to Plato’s The Symposium and the myth that human beings were once two-headed, four-limbed creatures rent asunder by Zeus and forced to wander the Earth seeking their other half. Fans of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch are already familiar with the beauty of this story, but Shanks finds both poignancy and horror in the idea that a relationship creates something that wasn’t there before.
That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is Shanks’s smartest move. Contemporary horror is glutted with metaphorical devices, but Together skirts around the pitfalls of so many films of its ilk by giving its compelling central duo a soft sci-fi scenario to contend with that casts light on where they are as people but which isn’t an allegory that we’re meant to take meaning from in and of itself.
But Together stumbles in its last act as its attempts to explain concepts and ideas that are more interesting and compelling when left as mysteries. Things get plotty and logically creaky fast, and though it all builds to an unforgettably gross and amorous crescendo, Together very nearly has its legs cut out from under it by a laughable final beat that cheapens the overall effect.
Still, Brie and Franco play their roles with such open-heartedness that it’s hard not to fall for the total package, even Shanks’s aversion to ambiguity. In short, the experience of watching Together is a bit like what Tim and Millie are going through: Accepting the whole may be a test, but to love someone is to know and adore all their disparate parts as if they were your own.
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