With the recent Weapons and The Monkey, plus the likes of The Substance and Bodies Bodies Bodies in the past few years, comedy-horror in the 2020s has really managed to find its footing. We have had spoof horror for a long time, but there has never really been an attempt to actually create something that tries to scare. You do not watch Scary Movie, for example, to be at all scared. You watch it purely to see a spoof of some of those moments that did potentially scare you in the past. Films like Scream rocketed this tongue-in-cheek approach to horror, and it seems like in this decade, we are getting a massive surge of them once again, particularly this year. Even 28 Years Later had an essence of this more satirical approach to horror, especially with that ending that I am sure will be talked about for a long time. I recently sang Weapons and Zach Cregger’s prowess for being able to walk that thin tightrope between comedy and horror, making one cohesive package that never at any point feels tonally clumsy. It is a really hard feat to achieve, and yet Cregger has managed it twice. New Zealand filmmaker Michael Shanks has also made an attempt at doing this with the recent comedy/body-horror film, Together. Whilst this does not really manage to strike a tonal balance properly, and it is full of lacklustre writing, Together mostly works with some strong, squirm-inducing body horror and a couple of great central performances.

Together centres around a couple, portrayed by real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie. Tim and Millie, an aspiring musician and a teacher, respectively, are becoming rather distant. This is mostly due to Tim struggling in his career and the recent passing of his parents, but the two decide to move to the countryside to have a fresh start together and leave behind their problems. During their leaving party, Millie proposes to Tim in front of their friends, and his hesitation makes the situation between them even more awkward. They move and try to spend some quality time together to bring them a bit closer. Hiking in the local area, they get lost in the woods and fall into an ominous-looking cave. Because of the heavy rain and the closing darkness, they decide to camp out in the cave for the night and find their way back in the morning. When both of them get thirsty, they both decide to drink from an even more ominous-looking pool in the cave. When waking up in the morning, they find their legs stuck together, and they painfully rip themselves away from each other. After this encounter, Tim experiences episodes of being overwhelmingly attracted, mentally and physically, to Millie. These episodes get worse and worse, to the point of them physically fusing together, and not being able to escape unless they use quite gruesome means.

The writing of this film is not its strong suit, and some particularly rough aspects of it earlier in the film really hold it back. This is a film all about co-dependency and becoming too attached to your partner to the point where you cannot function on your own. If the concept of the film was not enough to help you come to that conclusion on your own, somehow, fear not, because its script will slap you round the face with it as much as it possibly can. One scene where Tim reflects on not noticing a smell in his own room as a child because he had become acclimatised to it is rather on the nose, but then he has to follow that up with a similar story to do with his parents, detailing the exact same thing! It then goes on to him to compare the two stories and essentially just removes any sense of subtext at all. It is really amateurish, and scenes like this hold this film back from being even slightly intelligent with its writing skills. This could work if there was an ounce of that tongue-in-cheek tone present in this exchange, but it is deadly serious and, as a result, falls completely flat. Here lies the core problem with the film, and that is in its tonal imbalance. If you start this film by being comedic and spoofy right from the beginning, things like this would possibly work. The ridiculousness of them drinking from an unbelievably evil-looking demon alter after saying they are both so thirsty could go down as a fun gag to get the plot started, but they do not commit to it. Most of the comedy comes in during the third act, and that is just too late for a film like this, especially when it feels like it has purposely made clumsy writing decisions.

On a strongly positive note, the horror elements of Together are easily some of the best of the year, never failing to make you writhe in your seat. It has the perfect amount of escalation, from their legs being slightly, yet nastily, fused together, to points of them literally being under each other’s skin; it gets more and more horrible to watch. For body-horror, this is the greatest endorsement you can get, and while it does not get quite as gnarly as films like The Fly or even The Substance, there is some weird latent fear in me that just found this tough to watch at points. The hallway scene in all the marketing is excellent, and the tension it builds, whilst the actual body-horror being so perversive at the same time, results in what is an incredibly uncomfortable scene for all the right reasons. One of my favourite aspects of it is that it does not rely heavily on gore to induce horror. Instead, it is very much about body parts being where they should not be and also being stuck in positions where they should naturally be able to get out of. There are also traces of supernatural horror here and possession elements in particular, which are often well executed without feeling cheap like they usually do. The same can be said for the typical structured jumpscare, which are thankfully few and far between and do not exhaust themselves as a result. Rather than having a reliance on audio cues to scare the audience, Together is stubborn in its plentiful use of grotesque, disturbing, and outright spine-chilling imagery, and for me, that is always the best way to do it.

Together does not hit every narrative beat as well as it could, but its wonderful scares and moments of madness really make this worth a watch for horror fans, especially body-horror ones at that. Dave Franco and Alison Brie are great in these roles, and the thing that sells their performances most is their chemistry. For a married couple, this should be a no-brainer, but it is still infectious to see play out on screen. When the film is not shoving the core message down your throat, the silliness of the plot is good fun, and if Shanks leaned into the comedy more throughout, rather than just at the end, it would be a much better film for it. Though if anything, Shanks has shown that he has good care and attention for body-horror, knowing exactly what to show to properly make even the strongest horror fans feel squeamish. That is worth the price of admission alone, and it is definitely worth a watch.