Finding and keeping the perfect balance in a relationship – professionally, emotionally, sexually – can be tough. At the beginning of “Together,” Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) are struggling with their equilibrium.
We first meet Tim and Millie at their going away party: Millie, the life of said party, and Tim, hiding away in the bedroom. He’s a struggling musician, and moving to the countryside for Millie’s new job (she’s an elementary school teacher) represents the nail in the coffin of his already nonexistent career. He’s feeling lost, swallowed up into Millie and the trajectory of her life. Case in point, when she comes to drag him back to the party, she points out how cute it is that they’re wearing similar outfits. He promptly changes clothes.
When two people have been together for as long as Tim and Millie have, their lives become intertwined to a degree where it’s sometimes hard to recognize where one life ends and the other begins. After a dire end to the party, Millie warns Tim that they shouldn’t go through with this move if he’s not all in: “If we don’t split now, it’ll only be harder later.”
That line will come back in spectacular fashion in “Together,” Michael Shanks’ directorial debut starring Brie and Franco as a couple who, after encountering a supernatural force in an underground cavern, start to fuse together. A slightly on the nose metaphor for codependency? Sure. But, after a fairly stagnant first act, “Together” starts to go fully gonzo in a way that plays well to both its lead actors’ comic sensibilities, filled to the brim with great effects and set pieces. The film’s final message falls a bit flat – unless you, like me, see it as perversely bleak – but it’s a fun ride to get there.
Tim and Millie start fusing together because of a magical water source in a cave (this movie only gives you a modicum of backstory on what’s going on with the water – the perfect amount of backstory, in my opinion). At first, it’s Tim who feels a pathological need to be as close to Millie as possible. This is a strange development for Millie, considering where Tim has been emotionally up until this point – withdrawn due to the recent deaths of his parents, avoiding sex, and paralyzed over the stress of watching his creative dreams in a tailspin.
The first act of the film feels about as paralyzed as Tim does – setup can be difficult, especially when you have an audience ravenous for some bodily fusing to begin – but once the magical water takes hold, Shanks proves himself a compelling body horror filmmaker. He has a good sense of not only what makes a sequence unsettling, but also what makes it funny, effectively leaning into the talents of his two leads. In one of the film’s best sequences, Tim and Millie’s bodies contort towards each other down a hallway, their limbs shooting out at awkward angles as they start snorting and licking valium up off the floor in an effort to soothe their contracting muscles. The erratic, frankly quite silly energy of this sequence is such a 180 from the sequence that came before: Millie, sleep walking and attempting to break down a door with the full force of her body while Tim sits terrified on the other side. The only thing scarier than something horrifying happening to you is watching it happen to the person you love.
Performance-wise, Franco and Brie both start to lock in as soon as “Together” starts to get a little wacky. The pair’s real life marriage is obviously one of the draws for this movie, and they don’t disappoint. They have palpable chemistry, not only in their intimate moments (there is a sex scene in a bathroom stall that is as steamy as anything you’ll see this year), but also in their antagonism. Millie and Tim are often very nasty to each other, and both actors lean into their animosity and pent-up resentments with relish.
As fun as all of this is, the movie’s thematic exploration might work better if the cracks in Millie and Tim’s relationship were a little more fleshed out. Tim has more of a backstory, but Millie, in particular, feels hung out to dry. She’s given one moment during a fight to voice her view of what’s going wrong, yelling at Tim about how she played it safe career-wise for years, letting him take the risks and try to be a rockstar. It’s her turn to take risks now, she says, and his turn to take a back seat. As empowering as this speech is, the movie never takes the time to delve into the risks that Millie didn’t take, or explain why moving to the countryside for the same type of job she’s had all these years is a risk now.
Ultimately, “Together” is going for romance, working towards a reconciliation between these two characters without really delving into the details of how they’ve gotten to where they are, or if they’re good for each other in the first place. The movie dives headfirst into the idea of fully losing yourself in another person, ultimately seeing that action as a romantic one and framing the choices that Millie and Tim make at the end of the film as the same. The question of whether these two should be together at all, doesn’t seem to be one the movie wants to consider.