Australian director Michael Shanks’ debut feature combines relationship drama and body horror to excellent effect.
What if the worst couple you knew met The Thing? Carpenter’s Thing, not Marvel’s. That, in essence, is the hook for Together, Michael Shanks‘ deft, darkly funny feature debut. There’s no ravening, shape-shifting monster, though. Unless you count their horribly co-dependent relationship.
Alison Brie is Millie, a primary school teacher looking forward to a new job in a country town. Dave Franco is her boyfriend (she dislikes the immature implications of the term) Tim, a musician starting to realise he’s missed his shot a rock stardom, along for the ride. We meet them at their farewell party as they prepare to leave their city friends behind, and quickly realise things aren’t great when he hesitates after she makes a public marriage proposal. Maybe we haven’t all been there, but we’ve been in relationships that have gone past their shelf life and are maintained by a combination of habit and fear of conflict.
Settling into their new home, a roomy, rustic house on the edge of the forest, they stumble into a cave in the woods that seems to contain the remains of an old church. Something in there contaminates them. Tim finds himself irresistibly drawn to Millie, to the to the point where he can’t stand being apart from her – a stark contrast to their prior prickly and sexless dynamic. But when they touch, they begin to fuse together – toxic, needy love made grossly, goopily physical.
Together is a tight, smart, intimate little horror comedy. It’s not quite a two-hander – Damon Herriman, excellent as ever, has a major supporting role as friendly local teacher, Jamie – but the focus is rigorously kept on real life couple Franco and Brie. The pair do an excellent job of evoking the largely unspoken relationship history in play – we sense every grievance, every little hurt that’s built up over the years, every disappointment. This is very much horror-movie-as-metaphor, and you could argue that perhaps the metaphor is a little too-on-the-nose, but the leads commit to the bit with gusto. How much of their own relationship informs their performances is an impossible question to answer, but the very fact of their casting prompts us to ask it anyway. For what it’s worth, Shanks admitted his own past relationship difficulties (happily resolved) fed into the writing process while speaking about the film at it’s Sydney Film Festival opening night screening.
But they’re clearly having fun, and we should, too. Thank god Together has a sense of humour. It’s easy to imagine a more po-faced, self-serious take on the material, and that would have been insufferable, but there’s a rich vein of extremely dark comedy being mined that invigorates the entire film. It’s effectively a relationship dramedy dressed in the trappings of horror, and while the body horror elements, realised with special effects and evocative physical contortions, are suitably revolting, what resonates is the uncomfortably familiar passive-aggressive relationship being examined.
Together falters only occasionally. Shot in Victoria but set in an unnamed part of the United States, the film doesn’t quite manage to disguise its filming location, and the result is that weird United States of Australia vibe, where the little details spoil the bigger picture a bit. At another point, Tim’s revelation of a key childhood trauma, while essential to understanding his character, feels like something that would have come up earlier in what we learn is a decade-long relationship.
But those are minor bum notes in what is an uncommonly assured debut. For all its messy physical gags, it ticks along like a well-tuned watch, and while the climax is a touch predictable, its sheer inevitability has its own weight. Horror fans may be reminded of Brian Yuzna’s superb 1989 satire, Society. In Together, it’s a society of two – and that’s the whole point.
Together is screening at the 2025 Sydney Film Festival, and will be released theatrically on July 31.
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