Flasz On Film

Together premiered at Sundance earlier this year where all the usual suspects—A24, Apple, Neon, Focus and others—sparred briefly to acquire the rights to release this movie. After all, they probably all saw it as a potential Blum-esque elevated horror cash cow with its reasonable budget, a seemingly intriguing central premise and an opportunity for the audiences to emerge mildly disgusted and intellectually titillated in some measure. It just seemed like a no-brainer to pick this movie up for distribution and release it as summertime counterprogramming to Superman, F1 and other predictably four-quadrant releases.  

And I have to be honest here: from the outset, this movie looks refreshing in that it presents itself as that one elevated horror movie that is not wrapped up in discussions on grief, which seems to be the canonical metaphor of choice in this subgenre (Bring Her Back, Talk to Me, Smile and its sequel, Ari Aster movies, The Exorcism; the list goes on). Instead, it chooses to take the viewer onto a thinly veiled allegory of codependency in emotionally immature relationships using mostly heavy-handed imagery to illustrate the conversation and to make sure the viewer would not have a single chance to misunderstand what the filmmaker (Michael Shanks in his feature debut) may have had in mind.  

Honestly, at this point in the game, going to see a movie that isn’t trying to tap directly into that post-Hereditary vibe is probably novel enough, especially if there’s at least one more point of interest for you to enjoy, be it mood, tone or special effects. The bar is low enough that a movie like Together might trick you into believing it has something interesting to say about anything and that the way it’s going to do it is also somehow new to you without stretching its hammies too much.  But it didn’t, really.

And it’s fine, too. I don’t need every horror movie to blow my mind. Sometimes it’s OK when a movie just tickles me well enough in just the right places and doesn’t do anything egregious enough to eject me from that coveted state of suspended disbelief that I’d willingly put myself in to give this movie its day in court. Therefore, superficially speaking, looking at a film that literalizes the concept of two people forming a dysfunctional codependent relationship and weaves it into a story about how they moved out of the big city into a neighborhood where they had no other support network but each other, went on a trip to the forest, found a cursed cave and found out they are about to spend the rest of the movie resisting some magical forces trying to mash them into one person, as though they were two blobs of play-doh is something I could fundamentally get behind. It’s a fun idea in principle, especially if—which is the case here, too—the movie finds a handful of places to lean into special effects and maybe press on the gore pedal for half a second; though without overdoing it like some of the more recent examples (Bring Her Back, Dangerous Animals, The Substance). 

But there’s a big “but” in here that stops me from raving to the rafters about just how ingenious this movie is and how it shows us all that elevated horror doesn’t need to be dealing with grief, loss and depression—the big trio of allegorical staples filmmakers most frequently come back to, presumably because it’s an easy handful of chords to improvise over top of. And this “but” is two-fold.  

First of all, it seems to me that Shanks, the writer-director of this effort, wasn’t particularly interested in having his movie go to places audiences would be too unfamiliar with and decided to play things safe while adding relationship dysfunction to the list of emotional templates available to elevated horror content creators. Consequently, what starts by offering a promise of exploring an interesting dynamic between its two leads played by Alison Brie and Dave Franco, immediately resorts to basic resolutions, conveniences and worn-out tropes to progress the narrative, while also insisting that everything in the movie is explained loud and clear, thus leaving nothing to be talked about on the way home. We couldn’t just have a cave that magically makes Tim and Millie embark on a journey of body horror. We need a backstory to explain it, an establishing precedent that clearly wants me to think of John Carpenter’s The Thing, and a clivebarkerian cult to legitimize the story by grounding it in some kind of reality.  

Meanwhile, I’d have been much more at home with this movie doing its thing without needing to tell me everything about how it works. This way, at least it would be left for the viewer to decide if they want the story to work “for real” or to function as an allegory. By spelling everything out and letting itself land where it does, it all becomes cheap like an episode of Tales from the Crypt where it’s not about the journey, or how the horror genre is used to illustrate something as complex and intriguing as the idea of two people becoming so codependent that they literally merge to become one person, but rather about the whole story functioning as a lead-up to a pun. The only thing that was missing from the experience was the iconic visage of the crypt keeper and his equally unforgettable over-the-top cackle. 

And then, there’s the elephant in the room, which I couldn’t possibly leave out of the conversation. I think I can get behind the on-the-nose televisual narrative building insofar as it still rings fresh enough within the parameters of the subgenre. But what truly kept me from engaging with the movie on the level that I think it deserved was Dave Franco’s inability to act as though he meant it. Now, I have seen some terrible examples of people overacting, underacting, side-acting, non-acting, tryharding, blowharding and not giving a toss either way and it sometimes works wonders for what the movie is trying to do, but Dave Franco was either directed poorly or decided he didn’t need to rehearse. Either way, it was physically impossible to look at his attempts at dramatic exhilaration without seeing how his work was making the entire movie come across as profoundly fake. I don’t know but I couldn’t buy a single scene he was in and honestly thought he was either miscast or completely unprepared. 

Unless… this is all supposed to work not as an elevated horror but a parody thereof, much like There’s Something about Mary was supposed to function as a gross-out take on a rom-com. In fact, there’s at least one scene with a brief flash to genitals stuck together, which may or may not have been concocted as a tip of the hat towards that classic Farrelly moment with Ben Stiller’s fly malfunction. Maybe Together is purposefully undermining its own storytelling mechanics because it is trying to take the piss out of all those other uber-serious elevated horror satires, in which case every single thing I had a problem with would make sense as a joke instead. The cults, the lore… Even the Cary Elwes-like direction given to Damon Herriman as the approachable-but-sorta-creepy neighbor would make some fundamental sense. 

Could it all be just a joke? A feature-length lark based on the lyrics of “2 Become 1” by Spice Girls, which is eventually played in the background of the big finale of the movie? It could be. But still, if that’s the case, I’d like to have been let in on the joke a little bit earlier because even Norm Macdonald would have played it straight only for so long and eventually he’d let you know that the mundane and repetitive story he’d been telling you for the last fifteen minutes was about to end with a hilarious pun. Together doesn’t allow itself the necessary self-awareness to enable this kind of interaction. It plays everything straight until the bitter end and if it ever lets you know it was supposed to be a funny deconstruction of a potent horror subgenre with a metaphorical reading, the credits would have long rolled. Which is a bit too late.  

Thus, Together functions as a weird misshapen hybrid—which is quite ironic, come to think of it given the subject matter the movie tries to explore. It tries to play things straight. It wants impactful scares. It relishes in its brief flashes of gore and body horror and, most importantly, looks as though it wanted me to take the drama on face value. But at the same time it looks so corny and weirdly tonally jarring that it might as well have been a parody in the vein of Tales from the Crypt. Maybe it would have worked had it been audacious enough to make itself vulnerable to the audiences with at least a hint at self-awareness to let them know it’s OK to laugh. Without it, it’s just another elevated horror movie undermined by a terrible performance and brought down a notch by dint of being built exclusively out of conveniences that could have been left on the cutting room floor with limited impact on how the narrative cohered.

Look, all I am saying is that there is a better version of this movie somewhere in here: one that either trusts me that I could interpret the movie myself, or one that openly lampoons its own lifeblood. And I think I’d have liked it even more if it had had the necessary cojones to let me know a little bit earlier on that it was trying to be a feature-length interpretation of that schmaltzy Spice Girls ballad about sex. Because if I had to choose between the two, I think an elevated horror parody would have worked much better here, even if what ended up hitting the screen wasn’t exactly terrible either.