Blended family

Twisted rom-com? Squelchy body horror? Hazardous date-night movie?

Together is all these things, as debut writer-director Michael Shanks smooshes seemingly disparate genres into a horrific, often hilarious take on contemporary relationships.

When we first meet Millie (Community’s Alison Brie) and Tim (The Disaster Artist’s Dave Franco), two 30-somethings who’ve been together 10 years, they seem to be at an inflection point.

Maybe they need to decide, as Millie suggests, “if we love each other or we’re just used to each other.” Maybe they should break up now, she thinks, “because it will hurt more later.”

That turns out to be prophetic.

It seems as if Millie wants more and Tim’s pulling away, partly because of a recent family trauma. But they’ve decided to try for a fresh start, moving from an unnamed big city to a small town nearby, where Millie, the practical one, will take up a job as a teacher and Tim, the fun one, will keep trying to make it as a musician.

A hike in the woods leads to a stumble into a dark cave that contains the remnants of a sinister chapel, a watery pit and some kind of powerful, primeval force. By the time Tim and Millie climb out, their uncertain attachment is morphing into something dangerous.

Even as Millie decides they “need some space,” their bodies crave connection. Eventually, the two start to fuse together — literally. The film plays this first as grotesque slapstick comedy — there’s a cramped bathroom-stall sex scene with a very uncomfortable finish — and then heads towards some bloodier situations involving duct tape and power tools.

Shanks may be using an obvious metaphor for the terror of intimacy, but it works because he prepares the emotional ground. We see moments of sniping and scenes of real sweetness.

We learn that Tim cooks, so Millie’s never learned. She drives, so he’s never bothered to get a licence. Do Millie and Tim complete each other, or is this a toxic codependency? Is she the safe, boring grown-up partner and he the dream-chasing man-child, or are these just the roles they’ve been assigned in this relationship?

It’s hard to gauge: at this point, Millie and Tim themselves don’t know who they are apart from each other.

Brie and Franco’s performances underline this messy emotional muddle. The two are practiced actors who can handle comedy, drama and the often uncomfortable terrain in between, and there’s an additional meta layer that comes from knowing the pair is married in real life. While they’re not quite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, they bring a lived-in familiarity and relatable realness to Millie and Tim, even as things get increasingly gory and deranged.

And, wow, do they.

Shanks delivers well-crafted horror with an ominous soundscape and some eerily effective visual images. He sticks mostly with gloriously icky practical effects, and he’s particularly skilled at shooting terrifying nightmares that start to creep into daytime existence.

There are parallels to John Carpenter’s classic The Thing, the recent identity-blurring movie The Substance, and of course some nods to the Canadian godfather of body horror, David Cronenberg, but Together has its own wonderfully peculiar tone.

Though the story is slightly weakened by the perfunctory treatment of Tim’s family tragedy and by an overly abrupt and tied-up conclusion, this is a clever, capable debut feature.

In the end, Together’s take on modern love is deeply dark — like, no-good-options dark. But it’s also, somehow, a whole lot of fun.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca