Together Review | Clingy, Chaotic, And Comical: An Amusing Body Horror On Modern Love

One often wonders what lovers mean when they say they want to crawl under their significant other’s skin to be closer to them. Michael Shanks’ Together (2025) takes on that impulse quite literally with Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco), who begin in troubled waters. A seemingly mismatched couple on the surface, they’re together yet not in sync. Tim is mortified in front of friends and family when Millie proposes to him, exposing his fear of intimacy and commitment as he reluctantly says yes. This tug between Millie’s neediness and Tim’s retreat symbolically hints at people caught in an anxious-avoidant dynamic, even if only as a reading.  In the modern dating culture, “soulmates” has become a throwaway term, but this film reaches back to Plato’s Symposium, referencing Aristophanes’s theory of soulmates. Stripping the pop-language away, it’s about someone you cannot part with, without tearing away from yourself. That quest becomes cinematic through Together’s body horror. Think of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), where Sue emerges from Elizabeth Sparkle’s body and they are, by genetics, one being. Together poses a similar idea: soulmates like Sue and Elizabeth, who are so fused that killing one means the other can’t live either. It’s a toxic tangent, but the film tries to ask several questions—what if two people are cosmically bound, yet must face the dysfunction between them, where breaking up isn’t a cure and staying feels equally corrosive?

Millie and Tim seek a reset in their relationship by relocating to a secluded countryside house, cut off from the outside world. In the calm, they feel momentarily elated as they settle into the old house. While hiking through the forest nearby, Millie remarks, “I don’t want to be one of those city folks who go against nature and laws.” Her words feel like a warning and a prophecy.  Tim, however, steps off the trail, pulled by something he can’t name. The moment is quiet, but decisive. It is here that the film pins its larger argument: one cannot escape their instinct and fate. Nature is framed not as a backdrop but as a force—one that overrules logic and modern restraint. The clash isn’t just between two people; it’s between what can be planned and what must unfold. Things spiral when they get trapped in a cave that seems to be a collapsed church. After a tense night there, Tim unsuspectingly drinks water from the cave and the atmosphere shifts. In one moment from the trailer, Tim’s breath appears in-sync with the pulsating rhythm of the cave, signalling something deeply off. 

The film makes its point clear: they complete each other, even in their flaws—Millie can’t cook, Tim can’t drive. Their dynamic is built on interdependence, tinged with simmering resentment. Neither of them wants marriage for their own reasons, and that tension reveals the cracks. Tim wrestles with feeling unaccomplished, still chasing a dream. Millie folds herself into his life, erasing her own. The film doesn’t present a perfect pair—it studies a couple tied together by history, need and an almost cosmic attachment, uncertain whether love means staying or finally letting go. Tim’s seizure-like episodes erupt with raw emotion, pulling him toward Millie with an almost magnetic urgency. These sudden surges of desire unsettle Millie, who has been quietly desperate to revive their fading connection. After a charged encounter in the bathroom, their bodies begin to merge, bound by grotesque, gooey skin stitches that become more intense with each passing instance. This becomes a relentless metaphor for a relationship stuck in its own intensifying grip, blurring the line between intimacy and imprisonment. 

The film uses body horror not for shock, but to externalise the weight of unhealed childhood trauma and the messiness of trauma bonding, morphing conflict into literal transformation. Trauma takes physical shape, and attachment wounds split open the skin. Yet even in its most grotesque turns, the film dares to laugh—slipping in deadpan comedy that interrupts the gravity without undercutting it. The couple’s arguments crackle with awkwardness, almost bizarre, offering a varied flavour profile to the film’s body horror elements. Within its absurd metaphor, the film captures the chaos of modern intimacy—mismatched commitment, misaligned timing, anxious-avoidant bonds that refuse to break. But it doesn’t condone escape. If love is inevitable, the film argues, then survival lies in confronting the mess—and becoming one, quite literally. 

Brie and Franco, real-life partners, channel a kind of tension that feels lived-in and electric. Their chemistry makes it hard to look away or even think well after the credits roll. Together thrives on the chaos of a love that is obsessive, and hysterical. It’s a film best entered blind, where the thrill lies in watching the grotesque spiral. Allegations of lifting from Better Half (2023) shadowed its release, with critics pointing out striking overlaps. Still, the film has earned both critical and popular praise. Barring its uneven pacing, a few foreseeable turns and a final twist that feels more shocking than satisfying, Together is wildly entertaining. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t apologise for its disarray. It plays fast, loud and absurd, and somehow still lands as a delight.