Together
Horror • 2025 • 1h 42m
Millie and Tim have been together for many years; he, a stalled musician, she, a teacher—both burdened with disappointments, with habits that have eaten away at the taste for living. Moving to the countryside seems like the chance for a fresh start — but soon, through the discovery of a hidden cave and the sulfurous water flowing from it — the film introduces the uncanny: a physical intrusion mirroring the psychic and emotional fusion already underway. Their bodies are no longer stable boundaries, but shared, aching, deformed territories.
Love is the nostalgia for the half of ourselves we have lost.
— Milan Kundera
— Milan Kundera
Together begins from a simple premise — the crisis of a couple who have lost themselves in one another — and turns it into a body horror that attempts to become an existential reflection. The Platonic myth of the androgynous, with its vision of two halves once united and later separated, appears not as ornament, but as an underground current that fuels the mutation of identity, of love, of pain.
The narrative tension grows: at first lightly, in everyday gestures (the marriage proposal, the misunderstandings), then centrifugally, in body horror that goes beyond visual effect, seeking the materialization of the couple’s trauma. The third act, however, reveals certain limits in its symbolic depth: some mythological and cultic explanations appear rushed, almost imposed, as if to justify the strangest metamorphoses.
The Platonic myth of the androgynous — as Plato recounts in the Symposium: the human being originally double, split by Zeus, forever seeking its half to be complete — is evoked in the film through concrete images: separation, searching, painful fusion. But Together does not idealize union: this is no paradisiacal reunion, but a lacerating merging, with boundaries becoming prisons, identities dissolving into one another in ways that are often inhuman.
The attempt is to reframe the romantic idea so cherished by the Platonic myth: that of the soulmate, the missing half — inviting us to see it not as consolation, but as challenge.
This is not simply a horror film about a couple physically merging, but an existential experiment on what it means to try to complete oneself in the other — and what happens when that yearning is not a symbol of happiness, but a fragile, often tormented ground.
It asks: what if our “other half” is not a comfort, but a distorted reflection, a burden, an obsession?
It asks: what if our “other half” is not a comfort, but a distorted reflection, a burden, an obsession?
In this sense, the film becomes a meditation on existence: what does it mean to be “us” when the other inside us is also the site of horror? Pain becomes consubstantial with love, because to love often means to lose oneself. And this loss — through the metaphor of bodily mutation — becomes visible, horrid, yet necessary to interrogate what kind of relationship we are willing to tolerate, to nurture, to dream of.
And yet, while the premise is evocative and the intentions openly ambitious, the result remains contradictory. Shanks tries to merge the register of body horror with dark comedy, couple’s drama with reflection, but the whole doesn’t hold. The screenplay, which aims to carry tension, symbolism, and introspection, too often slips into superficialities and narrative shortcuts: crucial transitions are resolved hastily, mythological explanations seem pasted on rather than internalized, and the story proceeds in unconvincing leaps.
The performances by Alison Brie and Dave Franco, though generous, cannot fully compensate for these weaknesses: the weariness and disillusionment of their characters never turn into true emotional depth, but remain on the surface, as acted signs rather than incarnated ones. The chemistry between the two, on which the film ought to rest, feels weak, and ends up accentuating the impression that their story is less tragic than caricatured.
The plot alternates between moments of slow build-up and abrupt swerves into the grotesque and the unintentionally ridiculous. What should have been a genre hybrid turns into a constant oscillation that confuses rather than stimulates: one feels the film chasing a “cultured” ambition, a desire to converse with both Plato and Cronenberg’s horror in the same breath — but the result remains wishful, closer to aesthetic self-indulgence than genuine thought-work.
The conclusions, too, fail to convince: the attempt to give theoretical form to the protagonists’ lived experience collapses into a hasty, almost imposed closure that dismantles the allegorical framework built up to that point. Instead of leaving the viewer with a fertile unease, with an open-ended questioning, Together leaves the aftertaste of an unfinished exercise that disguises a mainstream, domesticated, even accommodating narrative dynamic under the guise of philosophy.
Still, ultimately, the film does attempt something important: to reflect on identity and alterity, on freedom and dependence, on how much of love is the desire for unity and how much is the fear of losing oneself. If Plato dreamed of union as perfection, Shanks presents union as trial: moral trial, physical trial, philosophical trial. And it is painful, often horrifying, but necessary to understand where the boundary lies — if it exists — between loving and becoming the other’s shadow.
I am what I am: a little of what I was, not yet what I will be, a fragment of what I long to become.
— Fabrizio Caramagna
— Fabrizio Caramagna