![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/d5166f8f643583bdb0fc1f36484e036028-together-ending.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n The new horror film\u2019s final image is played for laughs, but there\u2019s an underlying melancholy to it too.
\n Photo: Ben King\/Neon\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Together.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s always going to be a perverse thrill to seeing real-life couples perform a relationship onscreen \u2014 better yet when that fictional iteration is mired in dysfunction. Watching Together<\/a>, Michael Shanks\u2019s body-horror comedy starring married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco<\/a>, you might think of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Those films, like this one, don\u2019t depict wedded bliss or even settled domesticity so much as a deep rot at the core of their marriages. In Together, the cracks start off a little smaller, with Brie\u2019s Millie and Franco\u2019s Tim grounded in the ordinary strife that comes from any long-term union. As the film descends into the supernatural, however, the darkness comes into clearer focus, culminating in an ending that\u2019s somehow more disturbing than Together\u2019s predecessors \u2014 even if it leaves the audience laughing.<\/p>\n Millie and Tim are not married, one point of contention between them. They\u2019re also not having sex, which is either a symptom of their distance or part of the cause. When we meet them, they\u2019re having a going-away party before relocating to the country for Millie\u2019s new teaching job, a move that will stall Tim\u2019s musical ambitions in the process. All of this is a source of resentment, whether spoken or repressed. \u201cWhen I die, I don\u2019t want someone else\u2019s life flashing before my eyes,\u201d Tim\u2019s bandmate needles him. While all relationships require compromise, Tim is clearly struggling with the control Millie seems to have over their collective future. It doesn\u2019t help that he\u2019s haunted by a traumatic event from his past \u2014 after his father died suddenly, his mother had a psychotic break, and he discovered her in bed next to her husband\u2019s rotting corpse. She had lost herself so fully in the relationship that she couldn\u2019t function without him, becoming detached enough from reality that she didn\u2019t notice the smell of decomposition or even that Tim\u2019s father was dead. It\u2019s one of the more extreme examples of codependency and mental illness imaginable, but for a guy who feels trapped in a relationship where he\u2019s lost his independence, it\u2019s a useful metaphor.<\/p>\n But an even more potent metaphor is on the horizon as Millie and Tim go for a hike near their new home and end up temporarily trapped in an underground cave. Tim drinks from a pool of water (never a great idea), after which he starts exhibiting strange symptoms. He can\u2019t seem to be physically apart from Millie, finding himself drawn to her even as the buried tension of their relationship rises to the surface. \u201cIf you think I\u2019ve trapped you, why don\u2019t you fucking leave?\u201d Millie demands in a heated moment. \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d Tim answers, and that turns out to be true. When he tries to travel back to the city for a gig, he\u2019s unable to get on the train, instead finding himself pulled zombielike to Millie\u2019s school. They end up having ill-advised sex in a bathroom stall, then discover with considerable horror that their genitals are stuck together. (The quick shot we get of their interlocked organs may be Together\u2019s most cringe-inducing image.) Though they\u2019re eventually able to rip themselves apart, Tim\u2019s condition is contagious. When the pair later try to sleep in separate bedrooms, they wake to find that their bodies are being pulled like magnets toward each other until their arms fuse together into a mass of skin and bone. \u201cIf we don\u2019t split now, it\u2019ll be much harder later,\u201d Millie reasons before cutting through the connective tissue with an electric saw.<\/p>\n But the transformation Tim and Millie are enduring isn\u2019t just a metaphor \u2014 we eventually get something resembling an explanation. The cave they fell into was a buried temple for a religious sect (read: cult) driven by Aristophanes\u2019 origin of love myth<\/a>, as outlined in Plato\u2019s Symposium and also the song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch<\/a>. We were once all completely round with two faces and two sets of arms and legs on each side. Zeus cut us into two, and now we spend our lives looking for our lost other half. When we find each other, we are drawn together by something that goes beyond simple attraction, a genuine desire to be formed back into one whole. It\u2019s a beautiful story (particularly when Hedwig sings it), but there\u2019s a real horror in seeing it literalized. Nevertheless, that is what this seemingly lost cult aspired to, and they used the water to fuse with their chosen partners. In the film\u2019s third act, Millie discovers that friendly fellow teacher Jamie (Damon Herriman) is actually an adherent of the sect \u2014 he is, in fact, the amalgamation of the man he referred to as his husband, with both of them living in the same body. He slices a deep gash in Millie\u2019s arm, telling her it will speed up the joining process that she can no longer fight.<\/p>\n When Millie returns to Tim, he\u2019s ready to die for her, the only way he knows to stop their bodies from merging together. She\u2019s the one at death\u2019s door, though, having lost enough blood that it looks like she\u2019s not going to make it. Millie loses consciousness, and when she comes to, Tim has let their arms meld into one again. \u201cI was trying to let you go,\u201d she says. But he has chosen an alternate path, one in which they\u2019ll never be parted. As they listen to the Spice Girls\u2019 \u201c2 Become 1\u201d \u2014 the most expertly deployed needle drop in recent memory \u2014\u00a0Tim and Millie get naked and press their bodies together. We see their lips, skin, and even eyeballs meet and merge. It\u2019s gross and also a little romantic. The music swells, the very real chemistry between Brie and Franco sizzles, and we get to see Tim and Millie arrive on the same page at last. Faced with losing each other, they have abandoned any lingering doubts and commitment issues to form a union that can quite literally never be broken. And yet! The more you sit with the choice they make, the less aspirational it seems. What first appears to be the closest thing Together could have to a happy ending reveals itself to be something much darker \u2014\u00a0the nightmarish end point of a relationship so codependent that both parties have given up their autonomy completely.<\/p>\n That reading is underlined in the film\u2019s last scene. Millie\u2019s parents show up for a visit and are greeted by an androgynous stranger at the door \u2014\u00a0let\u2019s call them Timillie. This is what the two have become, a version of themselves that looks a little like what would happen if Conan O\u2019Brien\u2019s \u201cIf They Mated\u201d<\/a> segment had gotten to Alison Brie and Dave Franco. It\u2019s a punch line of a final image, and the movie ends before we have to deal with the ensuing confusion and distress from the parents. But even as it\u2019s played for laughs, there\u2019s an underlying melancholy to Together\u2019s final beat. Whatever independence and selfhood Tim and Millie once had has been destroyed. Their lives are no longer their own. As Aristophanes tells it, those of us who find our other halves would leap at the opportunity for Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, to weld us back into one. Together challenges the romance of that notion. Of course there is beauty to becoming a \u201cwe\u201d; there\u2019s also a danger in letting the \u201cwe\u201d subsume you to the extent that you lose yourself entirely. This is the warning at the heart of the film, a movie in which two people finding their way back to each other ends up being a kind of death. Yes, Millie and Tim are whole, but at what cost?<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new horror film\u2019s final image is played for laughs, but there\u2019s an underlying melancholy to it too.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[37197,39917,40135,88,6842,206,27054],"class_list":{"0":"post-52328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alison-brie","9":"tag-dave-franco","10":"tag-endings","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-horror","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-together"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}