John’s Horror Corner: Together (2025), a wonderfully tense yet touching “couples therapy” and body horror film.

MY CALL: Outstanding performances, writing and direction accompanied by some off-putting, awkward, and occasionally really gross body horror effects make this a film to move to the top of your queue. Easily my #1 horror movie of 2025! MOVIES LIKE Together: For more “couples therapy” horror, consider Return of the Living Dead part 3 (1993), Antichrist (2009), Honeymoon (2014), Spring (2015), Vivarium (2019) or Companion (2025).

Hesitant to abscond the big city for life out in the country, Tim’s (Dave Franco; director of The Rental) relationship with Millie (Alison Brie; Promising Young Woman, Scre4m, The Rental) is tenuous at best. They are making major changes in which only one of them is confident. Trying to make the best of this tense transition, a brisk nature hike in the woods takes a bad turn when they fall into an underground cavern during a storm and are exposed to… something. As moviegoers, we know something is amiss. But this scene is also when they are finally honest and present with one another. Such a shame for them… because now it’s gonna get weird.

Obviously broadcast in the movie trailer, the first sign of their “conjoining” is when their legs nearly fuse together as if two open gashes were pressed together and allowed to dry unto one another. The “hair scene” was unexpectedly unnerving and, frankly, quite shocking. The first “sex scene” was awkwardly painful, but also funny. With each passing unexplained phenomenon, their tension, frustration and distance mount. It seems that physically bonding together can drive a couple apart… and make Tim mysteriously ill.

As desperate times call for desperate measures (and a saw), things are gonna get messy. And as it does, we continue a rollercoaster yo-yoing between tension and re-bonding emotionally, back and forth, as our couple discovers, faces, endures, and tries to solve this incredibly unnatural relationship problem. Really, this is an excellent relationship horror performance by Franco and Brie. I thought everything about this film was fantastic.

There are some grotesque surprises along the way. Macabre fused-body latex work and gore is featured but not overplayed as a supernatural force literally pulls Tim and Millie towards and into each other. You might go into this expecting something more like The Thing (1982) or Society (1989), but this is closer to The Substance (2024) if The Substance wasn’t occasionally trying to make you uncomfortably vomit—it’s also rather touching. Throw in some way zany religious-culty babble and an unconventional story of falling back in love, and we have Together. Quite the conquest for the first feature film of writer/director Michael Shanks.