Real life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play a couple who have problems in this entertaining if somewhat forgettable body horror movie, written and directed by Michael Shanks.
Spoiler warning, as I’ll be fully discussing the events of the film.
Franco plays Tim who is a mid 30s struggling musician who is about to move to the countryside with girlfriend Millie who is a school teacher who has a new job opportunity away from the city. Instantly we learn that their relationship has issues when she proposes to him in front of their friends at a leaving party and he clams up. She then tries to initiate some body Tetris, but he can’t get his T spin into her inverted Ls.
The film teases some early horror with some creepy in bed talk that prompts us to see Tim’s dead parents watching them from the bottom of the bed. This of course turns out to be a nightmare, and doesn’t really tie in to the main horror story the film sets to tell.
Upon moving house, we get a minor jump scare when Tim smells out some dead rats which are stuck together and lodged in a light fitting. This is perhaps an early tease of what the main plot is later to come. Oh, and I forgot that the film starts off with two missing dogs behaving strangely before being seen covered in blood. I’ll be honest, I didn’t understand what was happening with them or the rats until the film would later reveal what was going on.
Tim and Millie go for a walk in the woods and quickly get lost in the rain where they take shelter in a cave that has the remnants of an old church inside. Low on water, Tim decides to drink from a pool of water and after another nightmare about his dead parents Tim and Millie wake up to find their legs are literally stuck together.
From this point Tim’s behaviour starts to become strange and we see that he passes out in the shower when Millie drives to work and her car movements seem to physically affect Tim. He slams about inside the shower to match her movements in the car. Later the two kiss and she thinks that he bit her lip, and he gives her a massage which gets a little too tense.
All this is building up to the nature of what is going on in the film, which is since whatever they drank in the cave where some unusual church used to hold meetings, they are slowly becoming magnetised towards one another and unless they can stop it they will fuse together into a single being. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure the film did enough to explore how or why this happens other than that we see an old wedding video of Millie’s colleague Jamie from the school who it is revealed had the same process happen to them.
I think the film could have gone more of a Wicker Man or cult approach where individual humans were trying to force them to do this process or make them some kind of sacrifice, as other than the teacher guy, no one tried to push them into it.
Perhaps the most shocking scene came as Tim went to leave town on a train to a music gig, but found he was almost possessed to stagger his way back to Millie who was teaching at the school. For some reason when she saw he was out of it she agreed to have sex with him, and although risking her job, they shake rattle and roll in the boys toilets. After this brief kanoodle, they find that they are joins by the gens and unable to separate like a pair of dogs on heat. They almost get discovered by a kid which leads to the fused Jamie to become aware that they were boning when she should have been teaching.
They give a clear shot of Tim’s ging gang gooly which is stretched out more than Pedro Pascal was in Fantastic 4 this summer. The joined at the gens moment both got laughs from the audience as well as grimaces. This was fine to include but was a point where the film started to feel more like a comedy than a horror.
They do tease that Tim thinks that Jamie fancies Millie, and even have Tim follow her to Jamie’s house where she has learned that Jamie is gay. I expected the somewhat possessed seeming Tim to go mad and kill Jamie, but this didn’t happen.
There is a pretty scary scene where Millie wakes up to find that her hair is being sucked into the mouth of Tim who is choking on it, but things go much further towards the back end of the movie.
The two argue and in the middle of the night are drawn into one another where their arms fuse like a monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing. They let down this moment by again playing it for laughs as Millie uses an electric saw to cut their arms apart from one another.
The film heads towards the ending where, now separated and keeping their magnetism under control with muscle relaxants, Millie wants to drive the pair to the hospital only to realise she left her car keys at Jamie’s house. As she runs there and discovers that Jamie fused with his lover in a creepy ceremony at the church before it collapsed into the cave, Tim runs back to the cave itself. Here he discovers a mutation amalgamation of two hikers who went missing who the same process was happening to.
The two reconvene only for Tim to have the idea to stab himself in the neck to stop the process, but before he can do this, Millie seemingly bleeds to death from a wound that Jamie gave her with his dual wedding rings. Why his rings were blue to become stabbing weapons is unknown. He also seemed to half turn back with a creepy dual voice and maybe face altered as Millie was escaping, but this was never revisited.
The final scenes show that Tim carries Millie back into the house, only to see that she is still alive and this is evacuee in order to save her, Tim has decided to fuse with her.
Rather than trying to infuse again they play a record of the Spice Girls song Two Become One and get naked and make out as their bodies merge into one being. The use of the song and the ridiculous rush to submit to the process got laughs from the audience and it felt like the filmmakers just gave up and rushed an ending here.
The last scene is once again played just for laughs as Millie’s parents show up to the house only to be greeted by a fused version of Millie and Tim who answers the door.
The film was ok, but the early scares were fairly unrelated dreams about Tim’s parents which played almost no role in the proceedings as soon as they had been in the cave. It’s like they inserted nightmares as an excuse to have some horror elements before the plot could actually kick off. After this the scenes of horror based around the process that was fusing the characters weren’t often that scary and other than the fact that this process was happening wasn’t really any kind of threat or menace in the film.
Together was a film I was pleased to see as the trailer had intrigued me and I got to see the film as something of a surprise as part of the Odeon Cinema’s Scream Unseen programme where I didn’t know what the film I was seeing was before it started. This said, I don’t think it’s one I’d rush to see again. I certainly wouldn’t say it’s worth seeing on the big screen more than once, and whilst I may check it out on streaming or TV, it wasn’t a film I thought was worth paying to buy on streaming or DVD. It’s probably best as a one and done horror and then will mildly catch your attention if you find it happens to be in in the background
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