I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!

I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best. 

As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely loved Together. 

The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there. 

There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone. 

What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry. 

This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond