Flesh is a beautiful, repulsive miracle. We crave its touch on others and fear it on ourselves, all its bruises and wrinkles and, underneath, the strain of muscles pulling at bone. And it’s flesh that Michael Shanks exploits for all its possibilities in his feature debut, the body horror Together, in which a craving for intimacy becomes a nightmare for a couple teetering on the brink of either marriage or mutually assured destruction. It’s natural to want to feel closer to someone. But how close, exactly, is too close?
The threat of co-dependency is turned into a dark joke in Shanks’s hands, as Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) move out to the sticks so she can start a new job as a teacher, and he can quietly resent his stagnated music career. They still say, “I love you,” but they’ve stopped having sex and are starting to recognise that “I love you” might have quietly transformed into “I’ve become used to you.” An attempt at a spontaneous, whimsical proposal backfires so dramatically that you have to admire them for not immediately packing their bags and splitting on the spot.
With their relationship on the line, Millie and Tim decide to take a hike in the woods near their new home – you know, for quality time – and end up at the bottom of a very dark, damp hole. Tim drinks some cave water. The couple fall asleep and wake up with their legs painfully adhered to each other. It’s probably mildew, Tim says. It’s not. In fact, it’s something much, much worse, symbolically foretold by the rat king (many rats tethered together by their tails, a rare zoological phenomenon), he finds holed up above one of the house’s light fixtures.
It’s a bad idea to drink cave water. Shanks’s writing, though, has built two wholly believable protagonists in Millie and Tim. They’re likeable but deeply flawed. We can comfortably laugh at their misfortune while feeling enmeshed in their traumas, particularly when it comes to Tim’s mental state and the unusual circumstances of his father’s death. It’s a nice departure from the old horror staple that it’s the man whose sanity is questioned first, not the woman.
As a relationship horror, Together understands that the call is coming from both inside and outside the house, and that how two people feel about each other can be shaped as much in private as it is in public. The terror of how their bodies feel suddenly outside of their control is only amplified by the knowledge that, just down the road, you’ll find the home of Millie’s new co-worker, Jamie, who Damon Herriman plays with an exquisite balance between the kindly and the disconcerting.
While Shanks’s ideas are smart, and his direction of the film’s digital and practical effects suitably crunchy and nasty, it’s the casting that makes all the difference. Brie and Franco are married in real life, and that lends an easy, lived-in quality to their characters on screen. But the genius lies in the fact that neither of them are traditional horror stars – they’re comedy people, used to bending their bodies and faces in odd ways in order to get a very different kind of reaction from audiences. You have to commit every part of yourself if you want to be a clown, after all.
Their performances here are just as dexterous, not only in their physical contortions, but how they can jump from one tone to another without ever breaking the film’s rhythm. They’re perfect together – that is, until the horror starts. Then they’re really quite disgusting.
Dir: Michael Shanks. Starring: Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Damon Herriman. Cert 15, 102 minutes.
‘Together’ is in cinemas from 15 August
