Being ‘TOGETHER’ Becomes the Ultimate Act of Codependency

A fantastically icky mash-up of black comedy and body horror, Michael Shanks’ Together is a biting satire about the horrors of codependency. And like any body horror that earns its stripes, it’s not for the squeamish. Real-life married couple Allison Brie and Dave Franco star as Millie and Tim, a decade-long duo who’ve decided to take the plunge and carve out the next chapter in their relationship. What follows is a twisted love story that’s equally weird, funny, and utterly nasty, taking their “growing together” to grotesquely literal extremes.

The next steps for Tim and Millie involve a move to upstate New York, away from the creature comforts, culture, and camaraderie of the city. For Millie, the move signals a new chapter. She’ll be working at an upscale private school and finds solace in the quiet of the country. Tim’s situation is a bit different. He’s a musician—struggling, as it were—so upstate solitude means fewer gig opportunities and a long commute if he wants to rehearse. This distance is further exacerbated by the fact that he can’t drive, penning him into the quaint, quiet trappings of small-town life.

To leave the city behind is to abandon some long-held dream, but Tim is willing to do it for his dream girl. Or at least, he thinks he is. Second-guessing creeps in as commitment looms, made painfully manifest at their departure party when Millie awkwardly proposes to Tim in front of all their friends. His response is a mix of confused, unmoored, and unenthusiastic; a perfect encapsulation of his inner turmoil. The question becomes: are Tim and Millie a great match, or just desperately clinging to the familiarity of their habits, their patterns, their story? Are they meant for each other, or just deeply codependent?

It’s a question that gets at the heart of many long-term relationships. Because relationships are hard. They require, at times, selflessness and compromise. To truly be a good partner is to give up a piece of yourself. Sometimes many pieces. At times, that means holding off on your hopes and dreams so your partner can pursue theirs. Or being the breadwinner when your other half finds their career turned on its head. If you’re not meeting somewhere in the middle, you’re likely destined to pull apart. And losing pieces of yourself to the wrong person is, well, a pretty bad idea. Shanks manages to both pay tribute to the sacrificial nature of relationships while skewering the idea that all successful marriages are just state-sanctioned codependency. It works shockingly well.

While on the surface Millie and Tim’s lives are pulling them in different directions, something deep inside keeps their gravitational pull aimed at one another. This becomes explicitly manifest in a physical way when they stumble upon a bewitched cave during a rainstorm. Mildly desperate times call for mildly desperate measures, and the pair, low on water, drink H2O laced with a Coralie Fargeat-approved substance that threatens to tether them together forever. They being sticking to each other.

Before the film pivots into full-blown body horror and starts interlacing their legs, hairs, and private parts, we see that Tim and Millie don’t always see eye to eye. Shanks complicates their fraying bond with Tim’s own trauma: ever since he discovered a horrifying tableau of his parents in, shall we say, a rather compromised situation, he’s rejected all physical advances and affection from Millie. The substance acts on Tim first, quickly reversing this detachment, manipulating his body and mind and making Millie more of a powerful drug than a partner. What was once a physical gulf between the couple becomes a deep, consuming need.

Tim cannot be physically apart from Millie, his corporeal form puppeteered by her absence. Her body becomes something he can’t wean off. What was once emotional dependence curdles into full-blown physiological addiction. This need for physical touch becomes increasingly sticky, quite literally, as their skin morphs into Velcro, sticking together like interlocking hooks and loops in increasingly cringy, fleshy configurations. Kisses become congealed. Hookups become carnage. Before long, the powered handsaw meant for home improvements starts looking suspiciously like Chekhov’s splitter.

The escalating body horror is brought to life through a surprisingly effective blend of practical effects and VFX. While Together isn’t exactly nightmare fuel, it delivers a few sharp jump scares, aided by an impressively tactile sound design and Alex Somers’ unnerving, thrumming score. Shanks, in his feature film debut, proves to be a patient craftsman. He lets the tension simmer, plays with negative space, and builds unease in ways that feel deliberate and slyly theatrical. The movie also looks quite good. You’re never quite sure how far he’ll push things, and that uncertainty makes it all the more squirm-inducing. While Together is not frequently scary in a traditional sense, it is gleefully gross, and I found myself both buzzing with amusement at its jet-black humor and recoiling at the squelchy nastiness.

It should come as no surprise that Franco and Brie are phenomenally well paired. They occupy nearly every frame and their frenetic, lived-in chemistry is the film’s strongest connective tissue, no pun intended. Franco plays Tim as someone who knows he’s withering but can’t or won’t change, a man shaped equally by resignation than delusion. A true 21st century beatnik. Brie makes Millie sharp and determined, someone who’s convinced herself this can still work, even if she’s pulling along dead weight. She can be cruel when she hits a breaking point but there’s a genuine goodness under the unexpected bite. And for all their dysfunction, they do seem to love each other in a way that’s a bit beat up but real.

They sell the stakes, emotional and anatomical, so convincingly that even the most absurd moments feel grounded in some recognizable truth. The entire film rests on their push-pull dynamic and they anchor it with a beautifully grotesque intimacy, the kind that shows what really happens when two become one. It is messy, painful, strangely tender, and more than a little bit cursed, making for what is sure to be one of the best horror movies of 2025.

CONCLUSION: ‘Together’ is a twisted, tactile meditation on love, compromise, and the bodily cost of staying too close for too long, brought to life by Michael Shanks’ sharp direction and a pair of knockout performances from Alison Brie and Dave Franco, both delivering some of their best onscreen work to date. Together, they make the film’s grotesque intimacy feel oddly, disturbingly relatable.