After a cold open that establishes the location of the film's central threat and mystery, via a truly awesome homage to John Carpenter's The Thing, we are introduced to Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Allison Brie). A young couple dealing with a myriad of challenges to their longterm and seemingly moribund romantic partnership.
Millie has accepted a rural teaching job that "forces" Tim outside of the comfortable rut he has enjoyed and become complacent in. Not that Tim being forced out of his rut is the lone source of his discomfort, either. A personal tragedy has jolted him to his core, haunting and tormenting him to the point where he is having trouble communicating just how deep the pain he is suffering is.
Tim's communication issues fast become intimacy issues. Now Millie and Tim have begun to worry that they are staying together not because they are still in love, but because they have forgotten how to be on their own.
But after getting lost in the woods and trapped inside the cave shown at the beginning of the film, separating from one another might now prove to be impossible.
Writer-director Michael Shanks, by taking page a or two from David Cronenberg's The Brood and, to a lesser extent, The Fly, transforms the complex and painful emotional and psychological changes and challenges Tim and Millie struggle with into something capable of changing who and what they are physically.
All those inner thoughts, doubts, and fears of losing an essential part of one's core self, identity, or personality when entering into an intimate relationship with another become manifested by flesh, blood, and bone that insists on fusing together.
Each and every resentment, doubt, and fear about their emotional partnership is yanked out of them and laid bare before them as they struggle against something beyond their control trying to fuse them together as one.
Whether or not a viewer thinks that Together does a commendable job of exploring how Tim and Millie work through the most challenging growing pains their relationship might ever face will subjective, of course. I think Together is a wonderful, frightening, funny, and, just maybe, a tad heartwarming cinematic Rorschach test.
Love it or hate it, Together is certain to fuel a great many interesting, challenging, and revealing conversations about what it may or may not be saying about entering into a truly binding relationship.
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