Years into their relationship, Tim and Millie find themselves at a crossroads when they move to the countryside, abandoning all that is familiar in their lives except each other. With tensions already flaring, a nightmarish encounter with a mysterious, unnatural force threatens to corrupt their lives, their love, and their flesh.
 

For a film of this nature, it was an incredibly savvy move to cast a real life married couple in the main roles. It adds a particular weight, almost of realism to proceedings, with Brie and Franco seemingly borrowing from their real life relationship for this. 
 

The story and the themes it explores are all relatively simple but its brilliance lies in its execution and just how relatable it really is. We all know a couple like Tim and Millie - so co-dependent on one another that it actually hurts. There is also familiarity in the little moments of their lives - both the good and the bad - which plays into our buying into their story and characters extremely fast. Even the horror element of the film is set up in such a way that, for the world created here, is incredibly real. 
 

Director Shanks isn’t trying to be particularly subtle in what he’s trying to say about those that are in the midst of an extremely co-dependent relationship. The brutality of the body horror itself, some of which will leave you cringing for days, rams home the message with a ferocity of purpose. Shanks also doesn’t fall into the old horror jump scare trick to ratchet up tension but instead uses the transformation of the characters bodies themselves to cause hordes of butterflies in the stomach of the audience.  
 

Brie and Franco are sublime here using their own lived in chemistry, wonderfully walking the tightrope between the more serious and equally funny parts of the story and characters. 
 

Together is a body horror that will stay with you, with its twisted, original form of horror and the themes it so delicately explores, for days to come.