It is canonical in Hollywood romantic comedies that Tom Cruise rushes home to Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, proclaiming his love with “you complete me.” This implies that before meeting her, he was incomplete.
That is the thing with Hollywood romantic movies: people are seen as fractions in search of their better half. Well, the movie Together (2025, directed by Michael Shanks) takes that to a hilt. Yet this prospect of “becoming one” is challenged in horror films that constantly threaten the wholeness of the body.
A subgenre that is gaining traction after last year’s The Substance, which catapulted Demi Moore into Oscar nomination greatness, is body horror. This is when the human body is pushed beyond its limits. This film makes the Spice Girls’ hit “2 Become 1” literal.
A young urbanite couple, played by Dave Franco and Alison Brie, decide to leave New York City for something upstate and upscale for a fraction of the NYC rent. If anything, the underlying horror in this film is the fear of millennial coupling. This film serves as an analogy for the fear of commitment and the idea of “losing yourself.” Indeed, losing oneself in a relationship is the basic ingredient of a marriage, when one must “grow up,” give up specific dreams, and take up a less-than-ideal occupation.
Franco’s character is a musician who has had some childhood trauma that left him with a lingering, heightened sense of suspicion and smell. The young rapscallion heavily influences Franco’s filmography. Still, in this movie, he is truly holding on to fading youth and dreams of becoming a successful rock musician despite trundling into his late thirties. The panic flashes on his face at the discomfort and uncertainty of being in the forest upstate. Brie is the formidable actor in this pair, given that she has acted next to Meryl Streep (The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg) and has demonstrated quite the range in comedy as well (Community and Glow).
Brie, a schoolteacher in this film, sprints between giddy sunshine and her role as the horrified partner in a tenuous partnership that has shown its cracks in the forest. Within that forest lies a site that changes everything, and “connection” becomes the very crux of horror.
The scenes of body horror are a magnificent ballet of pliant limbs and creaking bones. The sinew of the skin is the sieve of the drum of such palpitations that anticipate torn flesh. The scene in the hallway alone will be studied in film classes on body and horror. That scene is worth the price of the ticket.
All in all, this movie shows the true horror of a relationship: the prospect of codependency when one literally cannot live without the other. What if that is forced upon you? Are you willing to lose yourself? No monster is greater than the needy partner.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
