Dare to watch Together?
Strap: Love gets under your skin in this chilling, tender horror. Together is now haunting theatres—watch it.
OB Bureau
What begins as a tender relationship drama takes a sticky, terrifying turn in Together (2025), an ambitious horror-romance from debutant director Michael Shanks that fuses body horror with emotional vulnerability. Set in the eerie silence of the countryside, this film sees real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play lovers whose bond is put to the ultimate test—by nature, nurture, and something otherworldly.
Franco plays Tim, a struggling musician who follows Millie (Brie), his long-time partner, to her new teaching job in a remote town. Their decade-long relationship is already fraying at the seams when a fateful hike drops them into a mysterious cave. What happens next pushes them to confront not just their fears, but their very flesh.
Shanks doesn’t shy away from the grotesque. A pool in the cave triggers a violent cellular urge to merge—turning the couple’s emotional co-dependence into something disturbingly literal. It’s a bold, goopy metaphor that turns Plato’s theory of soulmates on its mutilated head. (A dog-merging opener sets the tone — brief, gross, and weirdly poignant.)
Yet Together doesn’t lose its emotional footing. Millie and Tim aren’t painted as victims or villains. They’re just flawed, fading lovers trying to figure out whether what binds them is love or habit. One particularly honest line from Millie—“I’m not sure if we love each other or if we’re just used to each other”—lands like a gut punch. It’s this human core that makes the horror hit harder.
Visually, the film is both stylish and skin-crawling. Cinematographer Germain McMicking and production designer Nicholas Dare play with misdirection—making you scan scenes for unseen dangers, only to surprise you from unexpected corners. Shanks knows we anticipate the worst, and he delivers, not with gore alone but with smart, squirm-inducing turns.
Of course, the film hasn’t escaped real-world drama. A lawsuit from indie filmmaker Patrick Henry Phelan, who accused Brie and Franco of lifting his idea, cast an early shadow over the release. Shanks, however, has defended his work, saying the story is a personal one, rooted in grief and registered back in 2019.
That controversy aside, Together is very much its own beast. It’s gooey, yes, but also quietly moving—a horror film that treats love as a parasite, but not without compassion. It doesn’t moralise or pick sides. It simply asks, in the blood-soaked stillness of the cave: what does it really mean to be one?