Together (2025) ‘Fantasia’ Movie Review: Pulling Apart The Horrors of Incompatibility

When a married acting couple decides to share the screen in a dysfunctional romantic drama, the prospect of art imitating life creates a discomforting sensation that we’re trapped in our seats, watching a couple’s therapy session we shouldn’t be witnessing. When such a couple decides to turn relationship strife into outright horror, that sense of uncomfortable voyeurism may very well lead the audience to believe they’ve been unwittingly thrust into the role of the couple’s therapist themselves. This is, of course, a vastly simplified reading; functional couples—even famous ones—do, in fact, exist, and sometimes their joint ventures are little more than an expression of their enduring love taking on surprisingly gnarly forms.

Take, for instance, “Together” (2025), the inaugural outing for director Michael Shanks that derives all of its star power from the budding power couple in front of the camera. Starring (and produced by) real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie, the film may overtly express the stresses of an incompatible relationship, but “Together” is actually, in its blinding terror, much closer to a meet-cute project that would unite its leads in the tabloids than a desperate attempt to rescue a flailing union in the face of dramatic exposure by that same frenzied media.

Making the most of their foregrounded presence as the film’s driving force, Franco and Brie play Tim and Millie, a couple on the verge of moving out to a remote woodland house as Millie starts a new job teaching in an elementary school. Tim, haunted by the demons of a troubled family history, has difficulty keeping his life in order; a flailing would-be career as an aspiring musician is matched in disappointment by his current inability to satisfy Millie in the bedroom. So troubled is Tim, in fact, that it takes every ounce of effort from Millie to justify—to herself just as much as to those around her—why this relationship is worth continuing at all.

Matters only come to be complicated further after a hike in their vast new boreal neighborhood leads them into a strange cave, laden with rusty bells and leading to a mysterious pool. Stuck in the crater to wait out the rainstorm that forced them there in the first place, Tim and Millie spend the night in this ominous hole in the ground, and when they return to civilization, they find themselves unable to separate despite how unwilling they may seem to stay united amidst all their conjugal drama.

Together (2025) — A still from “Together” (2025)

Part of the reason why “Together” is able to distinguish itself as a depiction of a fictional relationship falling apart rather than the actual one behind it coming to pieces is the film’s surprising levity. Utilizing the chemistry of his leading couple in a way that one might hope for a film starring a married duo, Shanks leaves room for light jabs between Franco and Brie regarding the increasing ridiculousness of the slow, nasty transformations that populate this film’s particular horrors. Marital issues may seem like a drop in the ocean when dealing with an inexplicable fusing of bodies, but the underlying reality that those particular bodies were on the verge of splitting off just as they’re forced closer than ever before can sometimes only lead to a nervous laugh to break away from all the confusion.

From there, the film provides a compelling spin on its specific shade of supernatural terror, playing on the fundamental body horror principle that the threat comes from within and compounding it into a register more suitable for Shanks’s chosen dynamic: in “Together,” this couple’s greatest threat is each other. If that reality sometimes requires a few contrived arguments and a far greater interest in slowly teasing the fleshy carnage than actually delivering on it, then Shanks at least manages to cohere these unfinished ideas around the committed, sweaty presence of his two leads.

Michael Shanks never quite manages to fully balance the buildup and payoff to make the absolute most of his film’s concept—a concept that, it should bear mentioning, was the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit in which Shanks and co. were all defendants—but in a way, “Together” almost benefits from its own dysfunction as a reflection of the disorder that flings its onscreen couple all across the hallways as they fight to stay united while keeping themselves apart. If nothing else, unlike the balance of their film’s narrative elements, or their fictional counterparts that inhabit it, Franco and Brie feel very much on the same page throughout this makeshift honeymoon-gone-awry.