At what age should you put aside your childish ambitions, your youthful dreams, your hopes of stardom? When should you admit defeat, admit failure, submit to adulthood? Mid 20s? Early 30s? Never?
In 1945, young men fought in tanks, piloted bombers, steamed in battleships. In 2025 a thirty-something manchild and still-aspiring musician like Tim attempts to spurn the marital advances of his long-time girlfriend Millie, whilst clinging to the notion he might still become the next Bob Dylan or – heaven help us – Ed Sheeran.
Tim clambers aboard the wreckage of hope, a hipster at sea, cast adrift from his record label but, in the digital age of the self-release, dreams are cruelly kept on life support.
No-one has the mercy or courage to flick the switch on Tim’s musical career. Least of all Tim himself.
It’s implied that sensible English teacher Millie has been carrying Tim’s delusions of grandeur for the best part of a decade, the same amount of time it took Odysseus to capture Troy.
When a new teaching job in the countryside beckons, it is Millie’s turn to be the centre of their relationship. Tim is pissed. Not openly but in that downtrodden, dog-eared, defeated male artist way. If he could afford a pram he would throw his toys out of it – no doubt all bought and paid for by Millie. A very public display of affection in front of their friends by Millie, followed by Tim’s sheer emotional incompetence to handle his response, makes us want to crawl into whatever hole is at hand. Surely their relationship is torpedoed below the waterline now.
However, a bed ten years in the making is difficult not to lie in. Tim hasn’t got a credible alternative, and we get the impression Millie won’t admit defeat as she would then have to admit she had wasted her young adulthood.
Microaggressions ensue, but are Tim and Millie from marginalised groups? What have they got to moan about? Tim snipes at Millie incessantly, Millie politely points out his every gentlemanly faux pas – and there are many.
Tim is a millennial Jack Torrence without the murderous drive, his Overlook Hotel stumbled on by chance, a sunken church, its centre piece a tentacled well throbbing with threat and its own below the waterline point of view.
What a hole to crawl into.
Previously, dogs lapped greedily from this Onibaba pit and then stared at one another The Thing style. When Tim and Millie fall into the church, his first thought is born of pure 21st-century existential dread: is my phone ok?
Millie is politely incredulous that her welfare is a distant second. What did she expect? Tim’s demos were on that device.
And that’s when the body horror kicks off in earnest. Trying to win back a shred of masculinity Tim coerces Millie to stay in the church for the night. They drink the water. Subsequently they are drawn together in countless zany, gross out, screwball horror comedy shenanigans. What would Mr. Fantastic think across the multiplex hall? Tim and Millie want to combine at the most inopportune moments. We can feel their symbiotic pain post coitus or watch their arms lock together shunt style like Brian Yzuna’s cult classic Society.
First-time director Michael Shanks fuses all his horror influences as if his life depends on it to create a rip-roaring satire on settling down and losing your identity to marriage.
Together is best when Shanks dials back the gonzo Exorcist sidewalks, or sweaty intensity of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and aims for the subtle homage. Some of his best camera work is the dream-like camera movement from Tim to the ceiling in the middle of night, reminiscent of Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant.
Together’s ace in the hole is real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie as Tim and Millie. Both are excellent physical performers, and their obvious chemistry offers shorthand insight into the doomed screen couple’s tumultuous slide into co-dependency. Every sly glance, casual aside, loving touch or violent outburst feels devastatingly authentic.
Let’s just hope they had more fun in their cinematic couples therapy than Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman did post making Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It looks like they had a blast.