Together, the feature debut by director Michael Shanks, has a great trailer. It really sells you on this being a new horror vision with a concept you have to see and moments that’ll last with you forever. Unfortunately this is a case of false advertising.

 

That’s not to say there aren’t moments in this film, there definitely are moments (the scene in the school toilet was certainly the highpoint), it's just that that is all they are, “moments.” The narrative, characters, cinematography, you name it, is all there to serve the moments, not the other way round. 

 

Alison Brie plays *teacher* who’s boyfriend is *struggling musician* played by Dave Franco who no matter the seriousness can’t help but deliver his lines as if they were written by Seth Rogan. Teacher and struggling musician move from *city* to *small town* for teacher’s job where they get lost, drink cave water and begin cosmically melding into one another. 

 

That’s about all the specificity the script has in it. 

It’s not even clear that the film takes place in America, we just have to assume it based off of the two leads’ nationalities. The small town doesn’t feel like a real place. Any attuned viewer will also notice the VicScreen logo pop up, or teacher’s friend’s Australian accent or the Australian actor playing weird teacher who is not in a cult at all and suddenly put together that they’re in Victoria and are just hoping you think it’s somewhere else. 

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If they can’t get us to believe in the setting, you’d be right to assume they can’t get us to believe teacher and struggling musician as three dimensional characters. They have cliche arguments about cliche things. Struggling musician doesn’t want to have sex because of trauma. Shock. I’m sure that’s not just an excuse to stuff in some spooky dream sequences that have zero plot ramifications.

 

And like, obviously the entire horror scenario of their bodies cosmically combining into one is a big metaphor for commitment but you still need to make us care about these people and show us why it is important that these specific people need to learn the sacrifice that commitment takes and not just shrug and hope we get it. All they do is show us a couple that should’ve broken up years ago and have them change in the last ten minutes to get across, ya know, character arcs, themes and shit.

 

Not helping either is the editing. Every scene feels like the producer came in and shaved off some seconds, maybe minutes, to get it down to a more sellable runtime. Things aren’t allowed to breathe, we just have to move on to the next scene constantly. Maybe they realised that the central characters in every scene are really boring or maybe it’s the rushed scenes that made the characters boring. Who knows? It’s a real chicken or egg question that’s unimportant because all we get to see is the crushed shell.

 

From bottom to top it is inorganic storytelling (with or without the controversy surrounding the script), like they rushed it into production and thought they could solve script issues later. 

 

The script is built to have memorable moments rather than to tell a complete story. Early on we get a wedged in scene of struggling musician randomly picking up a mechanical saw and turning it on and off. Any reason behind him doing that? Nope. He seems shocked it exists and like, didn’t you or your long term partner pack it, buddy? Let’s not be dumb here, the obvious reason is because when teacher saws into their conjoined arm later in the film you’re supposed to run out of the theatre and tell everyone you know about the “crazy” thing you saw and us stupid audience members desperately needed to know why they’d have such a thing in the house for it to make sense. It’s a shocking moment for the sake of a shocking moment that came with the expense of story structure. Why not try having a natural escalation of stakes instead of a loose thread to hang gore from?

Plot beats like when weird teacher who is not in a cult at all reveals himself to be in a cult should have the audience gasping. They don’t. Together just makes you eyeroll. I’d only recommend it if you want to scream things at the screen like, “DON’T DRINK MYSTERIOUS CAVE WATER AFTER BEING TRAPPED DOWN THERE FOR TWENTY MINUTES!”