Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon, my Darlings. For today’s blog post, I just have to give a full spoiler review of the brand new horror film Together! I saw this film with my husband on Friday, and we both had very visceral reactions to it in the best way. Together is a film written and directed by Michael Shanks (actually, it is his directorial debut) and starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, real-life husband and wife, also playing a couple in the film.
Now you may wonder what this film is. Is Together a body horror film with some pretty great special effects and sound editing? Yes. Is Together a scathing indictment of modern relationships and toxic co-dependency? Also, yes. Let’s get into how they pulled this off! Firstly, I want to state, it’s in the Water, literally, as the reason for the body horror is literally caused by drinking water. Now that I have teased that plot point, I want to examine the plot from beginning to end while giving my own interpretations and analysis throughout.
So, after a prologue showing a search team in the woods looking for a lost couple, the film truly begins at a going-away party for the two leads of the film, Tim (played by Dave Franco) and Millie (played by Alison Brie). It becomes readily apparent that Tim is not happy about the move from the city to the country for Millie’s new job as a teacher at the local school. Tim is the artistic and creative one of the couple, a musician still holding out hope of making a career out of his passion at 35. He does not want to leave, but Millie is the responsible one, the one who drives (he does not), the one who has a full-time job, the one who takes the lead in the relationship, and even the one who proposed at that very same going-away party. The proposal is truly difficult to watch, and both my husband and I felt second-hand embarrassment for the couple on the screen. It is painfully obvious that both of them hold a large amount of resentment for the other. Tim resents being emasculated at every turn, as he holds the feminine role in the relationship, as it is later revealed that not only does he stay home, he also does the cooking, and when the horrors of their situation become evident it is Tim who has figured out what is going on only to have Millie call him crazy (a role-reversal compared to most heterosexual couples in horror films). On the other hand, Millie truly resents being put in the masculine role, having to be the provider, having to drive Tim around, having to be the one to lead the relationship and propose, and hating the fact that this emasculates Tim so much that he no longer wants to have sex with her at the beginning of the film!
Once they have moved into their house, the hints of the horror in their future have already begun, with Tim finding rats in a lighting fixture, rats that have begun to fuse together. When Millie starts her new job, she forms a friendship with another teacher, also their neighbor, named Jamie. During this scene, the tension of Tim and Millie’s relationship is on full display again, with her calling him her ‘boy partner’ or ‘partner boy’ when trying to find a way to refer to their relationship other than boyfriend and girlfriend. This is another thing that makes the audience cringe at just how disrespectful that phrasing is.
Later, Millie and Tim go on a hike and end up getting trapped in a hole in the ground, a huge sinkhole with a bell at the top, and pews in the walls of the hole. This place has become an underground cave, and it has a large pond of water. They later learn from Jamie that the place they found was formerly a church for a New Age group that had sunk into the ground. While they are in this underground cave, they run low on water as they are waiting out a storm. This leads to Tim drinking the water in the pond, with him and Millie later sharing a bottle of wine he had packed and a joint that she had brought. They do some actual talking here before falling asleep, which is one of the few times it is nice to see them communicate, as they actually attempt to have a real discussion instead of just being passive-aggressive. When they wake up, they realize that their legs are stuck together, which Tim says is with mildew. They manage to get their legs apart, but we all know that it was not mildew fusing them together! Later on, they get home, and after a much too rough shoulder massage, he gives Millie, Tim has a tough time in the shower when Millie leaves to go to the store, as he gets thrashed around. This shows that he is physically unable to be too far apart from her after drinking the water from the underground cave. He even goes to a doctor about the experience and gets prescribed a muscle relaxer for his anxiety.
As the film progresses, there is a scene where Jamie visits Millie and Tim, and this is where he explains the origin of the underground cave. We also learn here that it is Tim who does all the cooking, and it is also Tim who states that the New Age group sounds like a cult, which is obviously true, showing some foreshadowing to Tim figuring out what is going on! It was during this scene that I noted that Jamie wore a wedding band; in fact, he wore two. When Jamie leaves, Tim states that he obviously wants Millie (which she denies, but the film does seem to want us to believe this to be true at the time). We also get another moment of body horror when their kiss begins to fuse their lips together, but Millie brushes this off as Tim having bitten her lip.
Later, after Millie drops Tim off at the train station to go into the city to play a show, Tim realizes he cannot leave. He even leaves behind his guitar, amp, and suitcase in the crazed desire to get back to Millie! He arrives at her school just after she gets off a video call with a friend, where she had mentioned her favorite band was the Spice Girls, and he had gotten her the album Spice on vinyl when they first got together.
Millie goes to confront Tim about showing up (and about his not leaving to go play the show he had booked). However, things soon heat up, and the two end up having sex in a stall of the boys’ bathroom at the school where Millie works. This is not only a taboo location, but it also provides one of the most uncomfortable scenes of body horror in the film. Millie and Tim find that after the sex, they cannot get their bodies apart! It leads to a truly painful moment where they have to literally force their sexual organs to separate. Of course, Millie chalks it up to them not having had sex in a while and it being painful due to that, which is really wild!
After this, Millie takes Tim home and goes to visit Jamie, who had caught her in the boys’ bathroom, wanting to apologize for what had happened. As she knocks on the door, we see that on the porch, he has a bell matching the one in the underground cave in the woods. While she is there, she confides to Jamie that she is unsure of her and Tim’s relationship. Jamie talks about his own relationship, that there used to be two of them living there, and that after he took a break from his husband, he was so glad they reconciled. He also tells Millie that he teaches his students about Plato’s philosophy (specifically this is found in The Symposium by Plato) about how humans used to be born with four arms, for legs, and two heads (or sometimes it is stated two faces), and that Zeus cut them in half in fear of their power, so now everyone has to seek to find their other half. I adored the inclusion of this, as this story is often told to be the origin of the idea of Soul Mates! Jamie tells Millie that if she has found her other half, she should never let him go.
From this point on, the film ramps up. Tim begins to investigate the couple that went missing in the prologue of the film even more (as he had a bit before, after Jamie had told Millie about it when they first met), and he finds that they were right near the underground cave in the woods. That is when Millie sleepwalks and begins to thrash violently against the doors of the room Tim is in. He has to slap her to get her to snap out of it. At that point, Millie is angry, and Tim tries to convince her that he was infected by the water and it has clearly spread to her after they had sex, but she does not believe him! She makes him sleep in a different room, and it seems that she wants to end the relationship (which would be the healthy and smart choice that should have happened before the move).
However, this does not last, as they cannot sleep apart, with a supernatural force drawing them together and merging their hands. They are only able to mostly separate when Tim remembers the muscle relaxers he has and they take an overdose, passing out. When Tim comes to, Millie has made the decision that she has to cut their arms apart with an electric knife, as they are still slightly fused together! Tim reluctantly agrees, as he knows this will happen again when the meds wear off, so after both of them have drunk whiskey to dull the pain, she cuts them apart. After this, there is a debate over getting more meds or even exploring the underground cave, with Millie insisting they need more muscle relaxers first before they can attempt to solve this, but she realizes that she left her keys at Jamie’s house.
Upon returning, Millie cannot find Jamie at first, but then hears a video playing on his television, and it is the wedding video that Jamie mentioned in their previous conversation. He allows Millie to watch it, and this is how she learns that he was, in fact, a member of that New Age Cult (which I had definitely called based on foreshadowing), and that after they married, he and his husband willingly fused together! That is why he wears two wedding bands; he is actually two people. Jamie goes on to encourage Millie to embrace this fusion, to ‘become truly whole,’ and even cuts her arm to aid in the process.
She is horrified and seeks to fight it, fleeing his house. Meanwhile, Tim has returned to the underground cave and found the missing couple, mid-fusion and in pain, as the man is dead, making their fusion incomplete! After Millie fled the house, she and Tim see each other again, and both confess that they know what is going on. Both are willing to die to prevent the fusion, but Millie prevents Tim from slitting his throat (another instance of her taking the masculine stance), as she is already bleeding out.
In the final climax, we see that they get back inside their home, and Millie awakens to find that Tim had begun the fusion because he could not let her go. The only way to stop her from bleeding out was to fuse his hand with her arm. They both choose to give in and let the fusion happen, expressing their love for one another. Tim puts on 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls, in another moment that was foreshadowed perfectly, stating he always thought it would be their first dance. From there, they strip off their clothes and fully give into the transformation of being fused into one being! This merge scene is uncomfortable, as we are seeing two people fully lose themselves in a toxic relationship. The film ends with Millie’s parents coming over for lunch to be greeted by a person who is obviously a combination of both partners. Clearly, this couple would have been happier if they had split up, with Millie saying more than once, ‘If we don’t split now, it will only be harder later,’ giving a clear indication that they should have done just that. Instead, due to their toxic relationship, they end up merged together forever!
So, yes, this film is powerful and crazy. It is truly there to hold a mirror up to the current paradigms of relationships, where in heterosexual couples, men are made to feel emasculated and women are made to take on masculine roles, even when they do not want them. This is truly a societal issue, as the expectations of each partner have become increasingly skewed by current societal expectations. This is what leads to women being unsatisfied that their partners do not take a masculine role in the relationship, but also feel like they need to lead, as that is what we are taught we should do as women. This is also what leads to men not wanting to take the masculine role, as they feel that their partners do not want that from them; they feel repressed and even dominated by domineering partners. Of course, for many heterosexual couples, this is never discussed, leading to toxic co-dependency, with the woman taking on the masculine role (and even a mothering role) for her partner, and the man sinking into a depression and lacking agency and ambition! I want to state again that this is not simply the fault of the people in a relationship; it is the fault of society that instills toxic beliefs about relationships into us from a young age. This film holds that mirror up to us, asking whether we will continue to value fitting in with societal expectations, or if we will choose to have healthy and open communication about our true wants and desires in a relationship, no matter who desires to take a more masculine role and who prefers to take a more feminine role. As that is what it comes down to, being happy and content in the role you have, not forcing yourself into a role that does not fit. It is okay for a woman to want to be the feminine one in a relationship; it does not devalue her, and it is okay for a man to want to be the masculine one in a relationship; it does not make him an oppressor!
My husband and I left the theater feeling uncomfortable and ill, as was the intent of the film, but we also felt so happy that our own relationship was not like the one in the film, as we have healthy and open communication and are happy with our roles in our relationship. We both discussed how we once knew a couple very much like the one in the film, toxic co-dependency, lack of a healthy sex life, and inability to communicate, and so on. To be honest, it was truly unsettling how much that couple we once knew was like Tim and Millie. That is part of the power of this film, as I think anyone who sees it will be able to think of a couple they know, or have known, that resembles the one in this film. I truly hope that Together gets us to more openly discuss these relationship dynamics with nuance. I hope that it aids us in remembering that men who are truly in their Divine Masculine are not people to be shamed. I hope it aids us in remembering that women who are in their most hyper-feminine Divine Feminine do not lack agency, and should not be viewed as oppressed, especially if they have chosen this and are in happy relationships. But, most of all, I hope that this film reminds us to be more loving, accepting, and empathetic of people and their life choices! After all, everyone gains true Sovereignty and autonomy through choice. If we live in our truth, then we are living in our most authentic selves!
I hope you have enjoyed this long, and rather in-depth, review of Together. What were your takeaways from the film? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is one of the film posters. I found the image on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/together_2025.
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