It’s nice to know classical philosophy is alive and well in pop culture. A lawsuit filed in May alleges that the makers of the body horror film Together — which was gathering festival buzz — stole their ideas from a 2023 indie rom-com called Better Half. Both movies name-check the creation story of a romantic soulmate as our lost physical half that originated in Plato’s The Symposium. And both illustrate this ancient concept with the song “2 Become 1” by the Spice Girls. (For the record, the Platonic tale also inspired “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.)
Michael Shanks, the Australian writer-director of Together, claims he wrote his script well before the makers of Better Half pitched their own to real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who ended up starring in Together. While the suit is pending, the latter movie hit theaters. As for Better Half, there’s currently no way to stream it.
The deal
Struggling musician Tim (Franco) and teacher Millie (Brie) have been together for a decade. But when she informally proposes to him, at a party celebrating their relocation for her new job, Tim freezes. Not ready to relinquish his dreams of touring Europe, he has mixed feelings about the move, which strands him in a picturesque country house without a driver’s license.
Unbeknownst to Tim and Millie, their new home is about to exacerbate their tensions in a big way. Another young couple recently went missing in the area, which is riddled with relics of a mysterious cult.
On a hike, Tim and Millie tumble into a cave containing a sinister pool of brackish water. After taking a drink, Tim suddenly finds himself wanting to get close to Millie again — really, really close. Now the couple must decide just how literally they’re willing to take the romantic ideal of two becoming one.
Will you like it?
Great horror movies are often based on real-life anxieties. What It Follows did for the fear of casual sex, Together aims to do for the fear of romantic commitment, and it brings genuinely gnarly imagery to that mission.
Here, physical intimacy takes forms that would give even the most inveterate cuddler pause. When Tim and Millie wake after a night in the cave, they find their calves connected by a gauzy membrane. It’s easy enough to tear themselves free — at first. Tim soon finds separation from Millie physically painful, though, and when they have sex, things take a nightmarish turn. Their bodies now seem to have minds of their own, and those minds are bent on oneness.
Shanks combines CGI with practical effects to convey the tactility of these attempts at union, making the audience wince and cringe repeatedly. In this movie, human flesh is as pliable as bread dough. A certain scene may leave you with second thoughts about deep tissue massage, while in another, eyeballs squelch toward each other, their lashes fluttering like lovelorn anemones.
These are images you won’t forget. But how much emotional weight do they carry? The couple’s relationship is unconventional (on film, anyway) in that Millie clearly dominates it without being portrayed as a harridan, and their conflicts have a lived-in complexity. Franco shows us the resentment simmering under Tim’s boyish breeziness. Shanks’ screenplay links Tim’s neuroses to his backstory, which offers a creepy emblem of the dangers of codependency.
When the movie tries to be the story of both partners, though, it loses focus and struggles to regain it. Though Brie brings her usual likable, puppyish too-muchness to the role — her failed proposal is as cute as it’s cringey — her character stays a little vague. We grasp Millie’s frustrations with Tim, but we lack insight into her feelings about relationships in general. And, perhaps because of the time spent in her perspective, we don’t get the payoff from Tim’s unsettling backstory that we hope for. It ends up serving primarily as a pretext for bonus jump scares.
Because of these underdeveloped pieces, the film’s bold denouement may not resonate as strongly with viewers as it’s intended to. Story-wise, Together feels torn in different directions, affirming its thesis without giving either character a full arc that plausibly lands them where they end up.
Nonetheless, marrying indelible visuals to a perennially compelling (if familiar) metaphor could be enough to secure Together a place in the horror movie canon. Why do so many people crave and fear “becoming one” with a romantic partner? The movie gets plenty of shock value out of exploring the age-old question, but the credits roll right when it might have started to get really divisive — and interesting.
If you like this, try…
Companion (2025; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): If you’re looking for a more cynical take on romance than Together offers, this sci-fi/horror satire about an AI mate is for you, though it doesn’t stick the landing.
The Substance (2024; Kanopy, MUBI, rentable): One can also become two. Body horror went mainstream with Coralie Fargeat’s satirical, over-the-top Oscar nominee, in which Demi Moore plays an actress who uses an illicit drug to create a younger version of herself.
Else (2024; Fandor, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Talk about romantic nightmares: In this French film, a pair is forced into pandemic lockdown after a one-night stand — then menaced by a virus that melds people together.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
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