Together — The Cave of Shattered Mirrors (or How Toxic Love Tastes Like Stagnant Water)

Together: full review

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Together, the latest monstrosity from Michael Shanks — a director who until now had only made music videos and brilliant YouTube shorts like over-the-top science-fiction sketches — arrives with the pretension of being a distorting mirror of codependent relationships. Spoiler: the mirror is fogged, cracked and smells of a second-hand car air freshener. The result? A film that seems shot between bouts of visual hooliganism and a low-cost VFX workshop, where bodily mutation tastes like a recycled joke and guerrilla CGI has the texture of gum chewed by a ghost in a hurry.

Shanks, a filmmaker who until now had shown a narrative pulse closer to the frantic music video than to the feature film, ventures into body horror territory with the delicacy of a bull in a china shop. His debut reeks of badly channeled ambition: it wants to be The Fly (1986) but ends up looking more like an extended episode of The OA (2016–2019), that show we all started with hope and dumped like a toxic ex on New Year’s Eve. The premise, admittedly, has its charm: a couple moves to the countryside only to discover their bodies are fusing biologically because of a strange force, forcing them to cooperate to survive. The problem isn’t the idea but its execution, which looks lifted from a creative-writing manual for beginners: “If your characters don’t understand each other, make them literally share the same circulatory system.” Brilliant, Shakespeare.

The industrial context of Together is curious, to say the least. Produced independently as an Australia–United States co-production (with support from Screen Australia and VicScreen), the film comes at a moment when indie genre cinema is desperately looking for the next viral oddity. Modern horror swings between two extremes: on one side, masterpieces that explore horror from an intimate angle (Talk to Me, 2022; Late Night with the Devil, 2023); on the other, guerrilla products that confuse provocation with impact and originality with a joke stretched to ninety minutes. Together lands dangerously close to the second group, as if someone had mixed the concept of Society (1989) with the budget of a Melbourne production and added a dash of absurd internet humor. It’s no coincidence the film toured genre festivals, where programmers desperate to fill screens with “weird” proposals accept anything that smells of “instant cult”, even when it really smells of creative desperation.

And then there’s the cast. Dave Franco and Alison Brie, a real-life couple who have proven their talent in countless comedies and indie projects, seem lost here in a limbo between physical performance and B-movie absurdity. Franco, with his “I don’t know how I ended up in this” expression, and Brie, whose expressiveness seems reduced to a catalog of complaints and “do we really have to shoot another scene stuck together?” looks, play two people whose chemistry swings between the uncomfortably real and the ridiculously forced. It’s like watching two Hollywood actors doing improv with a script written by someone who only makes TikTok videos. The real find of the cast is their ability to hold it together in such a minimalist setting, taking on the chaos of a shoot that feels like a home experiment. Their joint ordeal is the only thing that brings some humanity to a film that otherwise seems shot on sets that look like an IKEA after a biological disaster.

Direction: The art of tripping over the same stone twice

Michael Shanks directs Together as if solving a Rubik’s cube blindfolded: clumsily, but convinced that at some point the pieces will magically click into place. His visual style is as subtle as a hammer blow to the temple: shots that aim for dynamism but end up rushed, lighting that swings between stale indie and corporate-PowerPoint flat, and a use of digital color that seems lifted from a Premiere tutorial for beginners. The fusion of the bodies, that viscous, grotesque deus ex machina, is filmed with the same delicacy a five-year-old would bring to playing with modeling clay: lots of homemade latex, lots of obvious prosthetics and zero atmosphere of real horror. Shanks seems obsessed with the idea that body horror must be purely comic, as if he had learned nothing from directors like David Cronenberg or Julia Ducournau, who show that what’s truly terrifying about the flesh isn’t the joke but the loss of identity.

The pacing is another of its great sins. Together moves like a car out of gas: in jolts, with sudden stops and the constant feeling that something is about to go wrong (and not in a good way). The first forty minutes are a succession of sketches in which the protagonists try to do everyday tasks while stuck together, with the camera wallowing in broad physical gags. When the time finally comes to take the gravity of the mutation seriously, the film swerves so sharply you can almost hear the tires screech. Suddenly we go from a silly comedy with cult pretensions to a science-fiction thriller with Z-grade digital effects, as if Shanks had discovered the third act at the last minute and decided to resolve it with a fast-cut montage and a scatological joke every five minutes. The problem isn’t that the film changes tone but that it doesn’t seem to know which tone it wants. A satirical study of relationships? An allegory about the loss of individuality? A domestic monster movie? Together wants to be all three at once and ends up being none, like a dish that tried to mix sushi, paella and a burger on the same tray.

Actors: Between the Stanislavski method and amateur theater

If anything saves Together from total oblivion, it’s the tremendous physical effort of its central couple. Alison Brie, an actress who has shown she can convey fragility and strength on American television, seems trapped here in an acting limbo. Her character, a woman whose evolution boils down to going from “disgusted by the situation” to “resigned to sharing ribs with her partner”, is a waste of nuance. Brie tries to give her dignity, but the script condemns her to repeat the same bodily gags over and over: tugs, stumbles and “why is this happening to me?” looks. It’s like watching a dramatic actress forced to perform an endless sketch.

Dave Franco, for his part, has the expression of someone who relies too much on his natural charisma to make up for a lack of development. His character is so flat you can almost hear the echo when you knock on him. Franco seems to be in another movie, one where the absurd humor has a smart punchline. Spoiler: this isn’t it. Since it’s practically a two-hander of actors locked in together, the lack of supporting characters to interact with and bring some mystery or texture (beyond Damon Herriman’s brief appearance) turns the film’s universe into a dramatic desert, where their performances feel limited by their surroundings at times. There’s no one else around them to anchor the story to reality, reducing the whole running time to a constant scream into the void from two people who can’t stand each other.

Technical side: When the budget shows more than the talent

The script of Together, written by Shanks himself, is a perfect example of how a cheeky premise can be ruined by bad structure. The idea of two lovers joined by the flesh has potential for savage satire, but the development is so predictable you can almost hear the click of internet tropes snapping into place. The third act, the moment when the film should go up in flames (metaphorically, of course), is resolved with a festival of absurd gore and black humor so rushed you can almost see the seams of the budget shortfall and the hurry to wrap up the story.

The cinematography, made in the same guerrilla spirit as Shanks’ work, is another weak point, far removed from the great aesthetic standards of modern horror. Here everything seems to work with the flat lighting of an online sketch channel from the last decade. The locations, which should suffocate the viewer with the protagonists’ lack of space, are filmed in a way that makes the setting look more like a cheap set than a claustrophobic home. And the digital and prosthetic effects, those monsters of biological fusion that should unsettle or fascinate, sometimes have the texture of a badly done Blender render or a fairground magic trick, as if someone had tried to emulate ’80s latex but ran out of money for the finishing touches.

The score, built on pounding synthesizers and stock electronic beats, is a constant toothache that Shanks doesn’t know how to integrate. Sometimes the music disappears at moments that required dramatic tension, and other times it floods everyday dialogue scenes regardless of rhythm or atmosphere, as if the director had decided noise should cover the script’s shortcomings. The editing, for its part, is so rushed you can almost feel the cuts as jolts. Gags are stretched to infinity, transitions are clumsy and look lifted from a 2015 YouTube video, and there’s an alarming lack of cinematic flow.

The best

Physical spectacle: The physical effort of Dave Franco and Alison Brie: keeping up your performance while pretending to be physically stuck to another person for the whole film has merit. Premise: The premise has a fun, cheeky starting point, ideal for a midnight-festival short if the execution hadn’t deflated. * Practical effects: In the era of massive digital CGI, the attempt to use latex and analog tricks is welcome, even if the finish is B-movie.

The worst

Script: Predictable, stuck after the first twenty minutes and artificially stretched to feature length. Pacing: The film runs out of steam very fast, turning into a loop of repetitive jokes about lack of mobility. Supporting digital effects: When the film abandons handcrafted effects, the computer effects stick out a mile, looking like unfinished renders. Direction: Shanks’ direction inherits his internet habits; it confuses the hyperactive rhythm of the music video with cinematic storytelling. * Tone: Its undefined tone: not scary enough to frighten, not smart enough to make you laugh.

The Claqueta Ácida Verdict

Together is what happens when a cheeky short-film idea is forcibly stretched to sell a feature on a bargain-bin budget. It isn’t the worst oddity we’ve seen, but it’s dangerously close to becoming a textbook example of how a viral concept can’t sustain a film. Dave Franco and Alison Brie deserved a script with more bite, and audiences deserved more than a stretched-out joke. If you want a film that explores bodily fusion masterfully, watch The Fly (1986) or the recent The Substance (2024). If you want well-made Australian horror comedy, watch 100 Bloody Acres (2012). And if you want something absurd to pass the time, watch Together with friends, knowing full well you’re in for a ninety-minute internet sketch. The result will be the same, but at least you’ll have fun. 💀

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