In the Flesh: Together (2025)

The first time I did mushrooms, I had a vision of an endless sea of flesh, of quivering eyelids, trembling mouths, jiggling fat, thighs clenching and relaxing. An orgasm without a beginning or an end, the whole world shivering apart into unfettered ecstasy. That’s what Together’s nightmarish subterranean spring promises to anyone who drinks from it, and first-time director Michael Shanks brings it to life with terrifying verve and a sense of skin-crawling intimacy. The codependent relationship at its heart is exquisitely sketched, layered with years of built-up resentment and dysfunction. When bright and charming but controlling Millie (Alison Brie) proposes to her burned out and grieving boyfriend, Tim (Dave Franco), in front of their friends you can feel the air practically curdle. Millie kneeling down and opening an imaginary jewelry box goes from cheesy but adorable to unbearable in the space of an instant, and Tim’s desperate attempt to fix it by accepting after choking in the moment only makes the whole thing worse. 

Cornel Wilczek’s score is no less effective than Shanks’s effortlessly naturalistic and often surprisingly funny script. From shivering, multipart stings accompanying early jumpscares (to a one, perfectly executed and deeply unsettling) to the sawing, screeching clamor over later body horror scenes, the soundtrack salts each little wound Together opens up. Nor is the Foley work asleep at the wheel. The sound of skin stuck together by some biological adhesive is sick-making, enough to curl your toes and make you draw your limbs in like a turtle, immediately imagining that sense of tension on the edge of tearing open, of low, dull pain turning white-hot and irreversible. Squelching, rustling, cracking; no matter how minor or fleeting the sound, it’s rendered with loving detail into something that makes you want to stuff your fingers in your ears. The first time Tim and Millie’s arms open up to each other, creating a shared skin in which their muscles twine and interpenetrate, it sounds like someone fisting a raw chicken carcass, wet and gristly and unclean.

Shanks’s camerawork is playfully referential, from an opening clearly channeling Carpenter’s The Thing’s infamous kennel scene to a nightmarish dream sequence strongly evocative of Perry Blackshear’s cult darling They Look Like People, and as squeamishly intimate as he can get (my God, that bathroom sex scene), Arlo Markantonatos’s practical and digital effects hold up remarkably well under close scrutiny. There are perhaps one or two fleeting instants in which Together’s body horror is anything less than world class. It helps that the film gets tremendous mileage out of simple images like Tim squeezing the skin around Millie’s shoulder blades, or Millie pressing herself against sliding doors of Muranese Glass, her silhouette distorted and ghostly, and that the previously mentioned Foley work does a lot of heavy lifting, but even at its most Screaming Mad George outrageous, this is fantastic stuff. The rest of 2025 has its horror movie to beat, as far as I’m concerned.