By Sandra Hall
TOGETHER ★★★
(MA15+) 103 minutes
Together is a morbidly introspective example of old-fashioned horror embellished by CGI at its creepiest – a tale of love gone rogue. Australian writer-director Michael Shanks says it was inspired in part by his relationship and those of his friends. Fortunately, it seems his partner has forgiven him for letting his imagination create such havoc.
Co-dependent couple Tim and Millie find their bodies starting to fuse after a strange accident while hiking.
The film has been a hit on the festival circuit. After a popular Sundance Festival premiere, it was chosen to open the Sydney Film Festival, where audiences took to its unlikely combination of the heartfelt and the unapologetically disgusting. Shanks has no time for the theory that less can be more. He embraces horror in all its gory, slobbering glory.
Horror movies have always had an allegorical dimension. In the 1950s, the bomb was the energiser. These days, it’s climate change, although there has also been a resurgence of fascination in the old Gothic nightmare we call body horror.
A particularly fashionable offshoot is the zombie movie – body horror infused with dystopian paranoia – but we’re also seeing fables about the body turning in on itself to inventively grotesque effect. Fear of ageing fuelled the unexpected Demi Moore success The Substance. Genetics and AI are also doing their worst, but in Together, the governing emotion is all-consuming love.
While hiking in the woods near their home, Millie and Tim become trapped in a strange cave that may or may not have mystical properties.
The film’s American stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco, partners in real life, are cast as Millie and Tim, a supposedly devoted couple who elect to move away from the city, where they have a wide circle of friends, to a house in the country where she’s been hired to teach at the local school.
She’s overjoyed, he’s less so. A city-bred rock musician who enjoys touring with his friends’ bands, he’s afraid of his career slipping away before it’s really taken off.
The first intimation of disaster comes while they’re still moving into the new house. Ignoring all the warnings to be found in the Brothers Grimm, they take a walk in the woods, get lost in a storm and topple into an underground cave. Sodden, they decide to sit out the night before trying to climb back to the surface. Tim, who’s thirsty, impulsively drinks from a pool in the rock. Big mistake.
At the centre of the trouble to come is the dynamic that is shaping the couple’s relationship. Millie is the more outgoing and upbeat of the pair, while Tim is a wimp with an imperfect grasp of life’s practicalities. He’s starting to resent his need to rely on her. When they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, this resentment turns the pair into natural prey for the supernatural forces swirling about the neighbourhood.
The film was shot in Melbourne, looking as if it could be any small town in Australia or the US. Damon Herriman heads up the Australian supporting cast as Jamie, one of Millie’s fellow teachers. Except for being a little too friendly, he’s shaping up as a dependable ally before she discovers he knows a lot more about the surrounding mysteries than she does.
Shanks whips up a convincing air of menace, but I’m no fan of body horror in its most explicit form and the gross-out scenes had a countervailing effect on me, encouraging me to respond, not with shock, but a faintly clinical detachment. And Millie and Tim are not exactly enthralling company. By the time their fate was clear, I had stopped caring. But judging from audiences’ enthusiastic response to the film so far, true body horror fans are much more impressed.
Together is released in cinemas on July 31.
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