Three men in the prime of life stand on an apartment balcony, smoking cigarettes. Below and all around them is the city: glittering, crowded, full of noise and life and possibility. Tomorrow, one of the men will leave this place—and while his friends want to be supportive, they’re nevertheless appalled—because, this move? It’s because of a woman. He’s leaving with her. No, worse: He’s leaving for her. She’s the one who found the new job and the house upstate; she’s the one who thought this move would be good for them.
One of the friends heaves a disgusted sigh.
“When I die,” he says, “I don’t want someone else’s life flashing before my eyes.”
This is an early scene from Together, an excellent new film which deftly marries romantic comedy with body horror—and which encapsulates perfectly the mix of fear and loathing that characterizes the millennial approach to intimate relationships.
The movie tells the story of Tim and Millie—played by real-life husband-and-wife duo Dave Franco and Alison Brie. A thirtysomething couple, they move from an unnamed-but-looks-like-New-York big city to a remote location upstate. The unspoken hope is that this move will fix what’s broken between them. Tim, a musician, is professionally adrift and struggling with depression following the death of his parents; he hasn’t touched Millie in so long that her friends wonder aloud why, if she must move to the country, she doesn’t at least do it with someone who wants to have sex with her.
The twist—and the thing that makes this a horror movie—is that they get what they want and then some, becoming either cursed or infected with a magnetic attraction that causes their bodies to begin fusing together in what is basically an ultraliteral manifestation of that Bible verse about married couples becoming “one flesh.”
At the start of Michael Shanks’s film, Millie wonders aloud if she and Tim should end their relationship now because it’ll only be more painful later; by the end, their breakup has become not just an emotionally wrenching proposition but a physically impossible one.
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Author: Kat Rosenfield
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