Together (2025): The real horror is being stuck with someone forever

If there’s a moral here, it’s not just “don’t drink cave water.” It’s that the scariest thing isn’t slime, gore, or monsters in the woods, it’s being bound to someone forever. Yes, even someone you love. Maybe especially someone you love.

Michael Shanks’s directorial debut leans into this unsettling idea. Together stars real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie, a pair who’ve been together for over a decade and are now navigating that uneasy stretch of their thirties where dreams collide with responsibilities. Millie has landed a secure teaching job in the countryside and is ready to move, begin this new chapter of her adult life, and settle down. Meanwhile, Tim is still clinging to his band and the fantasy of success, but follows her as he doesn't have much else to hold onto. From the very first act of the movie, we are watching a relationship already defined by imbalance. One partner is moving forward, the other trails behind. They love each other, but clearly resent each other in equal measure.

The horror enters slowly. A hike, a rainstorm, a cave, a drink from a dubious water source. When they wake, their legs are fused together by some gelatinous bind. It’s the kind of high-concept body horror that promises grotesque spectacle, but Shanks is less interested in gore than the metaphors and subtext of its implications. Rather than dwelling in visual gruesomeness, the film pivots toward psychology, forcing us to sit with what it means to be literally unable to escape someone you love.

Franco and Brie are excellent here. Their real-life chemistry gives the film a grounded intimacy. It is easy to believe these two have a history of private jokes, old arguments, and unspoken frustrations. But that familiarity also makes their unraveling feel sharper. Tim is the one to be affected first by the water they drank in the cave because he is the weakest link, the one who is more dependent on the relationship. He grows desperate and starts frantically researching other couples who mysteriously disappeared near the same cave. He tries to bring his collected evidence to Millie's attention, but she is quick to dismiss him. This dynamic mirrors their relationship before the cave: he is needy, restless, unable to exist without her; she is pragmatic, carrying the burden of being the adult.

Visually, Shanks captures the isolation well. The countryside feels vast yet suffocating, and the cave sequences drip with unease, though he rarely indulges in the kind of full-on grotesquerie that horror fans might crave. The editing often cuts away just as things get truly uncomfortable, and I found myself wishing for a Cronenbergian willingness to linger. The Fly or even the most recent body horror The Substance come to mind as films that commit to body horror as both metaphor and nightmare, whereas Together sometimes hesitates, caught between being a satire and a straight horror.

What really defines Together is how the camera locks us into the couple’s discomfort. Some of the shots are just brilliant. The bathroom scene, with the close-ups on their fused bodies, is almost unbearably intimate. Then there’s a later scene outside the house, when they try to stay apart but keep getting physically pulled back together. The framing and camera movement really sell that invisible force, making it feel like a magnetic tether you can almost reach out and touch. It’s in these moments that the film is at its most effective. But then, just as you start to settle into that tension, there are too many cuts, too many jumps that break it up. It’s frustrating because when the camera holds, the movie can be genuinely claustrophobic and unsettling. Still, those standout shots show that Shanks knows how to make the lens do the heavy lifting, and I wish the film had leaned into it even more.

However, this restraint brings us back to the core question: is love sufficient when it involves being bound to another person, with all their imperfections, and no chance of escape? Do Tim and Millie manage to look past the resentments that endanger them because it's now a matter of life and death? Do they just suppress these feelings because there's no way out? Is surviving together equivalent to truly loving each other?

For me, this is where the film touches something truer than gore ever could. Love is, in its own way, a horror story. It’s intoxicating, consuming, but also a kind of trap. To bind yourself to someone is to accept their sharp edges, their moods, their failures, and to give up a certain freedom.

Together isn’t the goriest or most shocking horror of the year, and it won’t satisfy viewers hoping for a blood-soaked spectacle. But it works as an eerie, satirical parable about codependency and devotion, with great performances.

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