Sundance 2025 Review: TOGETHER, Body Horror Meets Folk Horror in Genre Mash-Up
As a corollary to the “don’t buy a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere” folk-horror trope, don’t venture off-trail, negligently slip and fall into a massive hole in the ground. And whatever you do, don’t drink any water you find underwater.
Solid rules to follow in the real world or its fictional one, but if you think you’re in one (real), but you’re actually in the other (fictional), it’s all but a foregone conclusion you’ll make the worst possible decision from a range of no-good, terrible, awful choices.
Said worst possible decision, however, aligns otherwise for an audience. In fact, it’s the best possible decision for the audience, especially when a city-dwelling couple with commitment issues, Millie (Alison Brie) and her romantic partner, Tim (Dave Franco, Brie’s real-life husband), in writer-director Michael Shanks’s enthralling genre mash-up, Together, make the usually ill-fated decision to pack up and move to the countryside.
The consequences turn on the old adage about marriage as a metaphorical union of hearts, minds, and bodies. Here, however, the last (“bodies” as in “body horror”) unwittingly takes center stage.
For Millie, an elementary schoolteacher by profession, it’s a chance for a fresh start, smaller classrooms, and more individualized learning for her new students. For Tim, it’s less of a fresh start than another, possibly last chance to salvage what’s left of his relationship with Millie and overcome generational trauma. A middling musician of no particular note, Tim brings his recording equipment with him to their new country home, but it’s obvious to everyone around him, including Millie, that a professional career as a musician isn’t just unlikely, it’s practically doomed to failure.
That’s all exposition and background, however, to what happens to Millie and Tim next: On a day hike through the nearby woods, they inadvertently wander off the trail, get lost, and even worse, fall into a massive hole oddly filled with sideways pews, an abandoned altar, and an underground well covered in sinister-looking tendrils. Neither Tim nor Millie can sidestep the temptation offered by the underground well, all the presumably clean water they can drink while they wait out a winter storm.
With one sip from the underground well water, their fates, already intertwined due to their romantic relationship, redefines complicated. They awake from a nap to find their legs inexplicably linked by a milky, semi-transparent substance. Tim dismisses it as mildew. He's wrong, of course. Setting the body-horror tone for gnarly things to come, separation causes them more discomfort than pain. In time, the physical pain of connection and separation will reverse the discomfort-pain index.
Together’s body horror arrives in ever increasing waves: as Millie drives to her elementary school, the homebound Tim suffers a series of debilitating spasms in the shower, the first of many to come. Shanks cleverly takes a simple, familiar concept drawn from psychology, separation anxiety, and takes the idea to the literal extreme: with meds, Tim can control his body’s revolt against his mind.
When the meds wear off, though, nothing can stop Tim’s body from finding Millie and bonding with her through any means necessary. Which Tim does, repeatedly, in a series of stakes-raising, show-stopping set pieces. Millie, initially confused by Tim’s bizarre behavior, later frightened by it, desperately searches for a reason, any reason whatsoever for Tim’s troubling affliction.
Undoubtedly more of a curse than a blessing, Tim’s newfound affliction affects him in ways seen and unseen, in ways understood and misunderstood, while Millie, the dutiful, if wavering partner, ultimately finds herself trapped like Tim, making what happens, the decisions each make for themselves and each other, made all the more fascinating as Shanks, a shorts director making his feature-film debut, ably proves himself an able master of tone, mood, and atmosphere.
He also manages to frequently elicit wince- and cringe-inducing humor from the most horrific of circumstances, specifically the more discomfiting, gorier aspects of body/folk horror, taking Together into fresh, uncertain, unexpected territory.
Together premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Visit the film's page at the festival's official site for more information.
Together
Director(s)
- Michael Shanks
Writer(s)
- Michael Shanks
Cast
- Alison Brie
- Dave Franco
- Damon Herriman
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