Premiering in the midnight slot at Sundance, ‘Together’ is a perfect fit for that space: a gory, unsettling horror film with a razor-sharp core. Real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco star as a pair who leave the city for the countryside, only to find their already fragile relationship tested to terrifying extremes. What begins as an uneasy getaway spirals into a surreal ordeal, as they fall – literally – into a pit in the woods and are never the same again.

The couple’s history is marked by an on-again, off-again dynamic, especially in the bedroom. But once they become physically entangled, their inability to disentangle becomes a grotesque metaphor for emotional dependency. The film is particularly striking in how it flips expectations: here it is the man who cannot function without the woman, an inversion that adds layers to the horror. The private messiness of their relationship is dragged into public view, not by choice but by circumstance, with colleagues and acquaintances bearing witness to their humiliations.

The body horror is extreme, pushing into the territory of ‘The Substance’. Flesh literally conjoins, and the sequences of mutilation, including an inventive chainsaw ‘solution’, are both horrifying and darkly satirical. It’s transgressive not for shock value alone, but because it forces the audience to confront how relationships can consume us – sometimes to the point of obliteration.

What makes the film clever is the way it amplifies ordinary tensions: moving from one environment to another doesn’t solve problems, it intensifies them. Many viewers will recognize the unease of questioning a relationship’s future – whether love is investment or mistake. ‘Together’ takes that familiar uncertainty and pushes it to a frightening, visceral extreme.

In the end, it’s not just a horror film about gore and entrapment, but a sharp metaphor for the terror of commitment. Much like ‘The Substance’, it lingers because it’s about more than the body – it’s about the unbearable closeness of another person when love and fear become indistinguishable.