2025’s most emotionally devastating love story was a terrifying indie film about a couple who can’t resist the urge to smother each other. Starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, “Together” is everything you want in a top-tier romance, delivering an emotionally wrought, sexually charged psychological treatise about partners grappling with the implications of their relationship. The couple, who previously collaborated on films like the 2023 rom-com “Somebody I Used To Know,” deliver breathtaking performances in this romantic-comedy-turned-horrific-fever-dream in which one partner takes a hacksaw to the other.
The feature film debut of writer-director Michael Shanks, “Together” follows longtime couple Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) as they uproot their city-bound lives for the suburbs. A schoolteacher and struggling musician, respectively, viewers find the couple entrenched within ruts familiar to any long-term relationship. Thrust into the unfamiliar surroundings, their lives devolve into a little shop of monogamous horrors. To ward off this onset of malaise, the couple ventures into the backwoods behind their home, where they encounter a mystical force that literally forces them back together.
Debuted to raucous reviews at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival, where the small-budget horror scored a major distribution deal with Neon, “Together” was a major win for indie films. A sharp investigation into the inexplicable logic and chemistry of long-term relationships, it is the perfect film to enjoy with your significant other. One of several high-concept horror flicks currently streaming on Hulu, “Together” is a breakup drama clothed in a phantasmagoria of blood and guts, interrogating the ramifications of the extreme codependence inherent in lifelong commitments, and the pain of searching for identity in the face of its dissolution.
Michael Shanks’ triumphant debut
“Together” plays on both an audience’s primordial and intellectual fears. Its concept, that of an emotionally drifting couple physically fused together, delivers as both a high-minded philosophical inquiry and a compelling gambit of squeal-inducing body contortion. Explicitly rooted in the Greek playwright Aristophanes’ tongue-in-cheek depiction of love in Plato’s “Symposium,” in which humanity is cast as half-formed creatures in perpetual search for their second half, “Together” takes a ubiquitous metaphor and unflinchingly carries it to its ultimate conclusion.
Despite its high concept, “Together” is just as thrilling a feat of technical moviemaking. Shanks, a self-taught film buff who cut his teeth making a cult-classic YouTube comedy series, employs a series of ingenious practical effects to deliver a frenzy of jump scares, gross-outs, and skin-crawling illusions. According to the director, the effects took nearly as large a toll on its actors as the characters they portrayed, involving burdensome prosthetics and tying a series of ropes and wires around their extremities to physically force them together. “We basically tortured Dave and Alison every day of this shoot,” he said of his two leads, in an interview with Sundance.
Shanks masterfully renders what in lesser hands would devolve into either a cheesy B-movie or an overly ornate think piece into a humorous fright fest as intellectually compelling as it is terrifying. Shanks’ conceit plays as if the debut director threw “Midsommar,” “The Substance,” and “Blue Valentine” into a David Cronenberg-shaped blender, producing a dangerous cocktail of cultish mysticism, gory viscera, and psychosexual angst whose aftertaste lingers far beyond its 102-minute run time. As such, “Together” is a triumphant addition to the era’s indie horror canon, standing amongst the genre’s best with its unique brand of scares analogous only to that grotesque masochism of puss-riddled dermatology videos.
Franco and Brie deliver an emotionally resonant horror show
Although masterfully wrought, the engine propelling “Together” is the undeniable chemistry between its two leads, as viewers delight in the psychological, sexual, and emotional dissolution of one of Hollywood’s most beloved couples. The arguments feel real, their tensions well-worn, the identity crises eminently relatable. And while both have denied any similarities between the film and their off-screen relationship, their marriage inevitably informs the viewer’s experience, suspending any remnants of disbelief in its otherwise absurd premise. As such, Brie and Franco ground Shanks’ Lovecraftian excavation of the uncanny within a claustrophobic domestic drama, tethering the audience not to the ingenuity of its conceit or the poignancy of its philosophy but the emotional immediacy of their relationship.
The result is that “Together’s” most affecting moments have nothing to do with the mystical forces at its center. Even with the specter of Chekhov’s hacksaw looming over the proceedings, one can’t help but feel that the true dangers aren’t physical at all. In fact, the nightmarish grotesquery only accentuates the eerie universality of losing oneself within a relationship. More horrific than their supernatural merger is the couple’s emotional schism, their deepening silences eminently more vexing than any violent scream of terror.
“Together” accomplishes what only the best horror films can, translating an abstract sensation into a readily identifiable motif. Serving as a relationship Rorschach test, watching it with your significant other runs the risk of seeing your most intimate fights unnervingly rendered on screen. So if your kink is emotional catharsis wrapped in a viscous somatosensory horror-blanket, then a one-night-stand with Shanks’ exorcism of monogamous cathexis might be the ideal romantic evening. Luckily, my relationship survived the bloody stress test. Will yours?
