Together stars real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as Millie and Tim, and immediately opens on a horror scene: a public engagement at a going-away party, met by a delayed yes.
Stuck in the suffocating decline of their ten-year relationship and reluctantly engaged, Tim and Millie relocate from their home in the city to a quiet rural town for Millie’s new teaching job and a fresh start. On a hike through their woodsy new locale, the couple take shelter from a storm in a cave. This was their first mistake. Or was it the engagement? The move? We digress.
The set-up
Tim and Millie spend the night in the cave and Tim quenches his thirst in the cave’s pool. The next morning, they wake up to find their bodies are beginning to fuse. What starts as subtle, accidental contact soon escalates into full-blown body horror, turning their intimacy into something terrifyingly literal. The couple separate and dismiss the whole thing—call it moving stress.
Soon after, Tim finds himself drawn to Millie with an almost magnetic force. At first, it seems like an awkward symptom of unresolved intimacy issues, but the episodes grow more intense and uncontrollable, leaving them both disturbed and unsettled.
Around this time, Millie’s new coworker, Jamie, stops by their house under the guise of a friendly neighborhood welcome. Over dinner, as the couple hesitantly recounts their strange cave experience, Jamie casually drops a chilling detail: the cavern was once the site of a New Age spiritual collective that believed in transcendence through bodily union. That is, until the entire congregation mysteriously vanished after the cave collapsed.
Later, Millie drops Tim off at the train station for a music gig (rare!), hoping some distance might ease the growing tension between them. But Tim, overwhelmed by another episode of uncontrollable physical compulsion, abandons the trip and stumbles to Millie’s school in a trance-like state.
She finds him in the bathroom, confused and panicked, and confronts him inside a stall. The confrontation spirals into a desperate, emotionally charged sexual encounter—only for them to realize, moments later, that they’re physically fused at the genitals. The painful process of separating leaves them shaken and literally raw, while Jamie watches from a distance.
Millie visits Jamie’s home again, and he invites her in with eerie calm and a glass of water (read: water).
She opens up about her relationship with Tim, and Jamie responds with a philosophical anecdote about Aristophanes’ origin of love. TL;DR: Humans were once whole and split in two, destined to spend their lives searching for their missing half.
Jamie speaks of his late husband and their sacred and inevitable union, but their conversation is interrupted when Millie spots a dazed, barely-standing Tim outside the house. Desperate for answers, Tim visits a local doctor, only to be brushed off with a diagnosis of anxiety and a prescription for muscle relaxants. Down with big pharma.
Dismissed and medicated, Tim becomes obsessed with tracking down a couple who recently vanished from the area without a trace. In their final photos, he notices the same symbols that he saw in the cave he and Millie stumbled into. In classic horror form, he tries to explain this to Millie, and she rationalizes it away.
That night, their bodies betray them once again. You get it at this point, they are fusing.
In a desperate attempt at control, they down Tim’s newly prescribed pills and pass out. When Tim comes to, he’s tied to a chair and sees Millie brandishing a chainsaw. Cut through some horror, and they’re bleeding, separate, and somehow alive.
So, how does this thing end?
Recently ravaged by buzz saw, Tim returns to the cave, following his obsession to its conclusion: he finds the missing couple still alive, horribly fused into a single, moaning half-human entity.
Meanwhile, Millie returns to Jamie’s house, where she finds a ritualistic home video playing on loop. In it, two men—both eerily resembling Jamie—stand in front of a ceremonial altar, slicing their wrists and pressing the wounds together in union. Jamie’s demeanor shifts from charming to menacing as he urges Millie to embrace the same fate with Tim, warning that resisting the transformation only leads to greater suffering. (If you got lost around this time, here’s the gist. Jamie wasn’t always one person, but two individuals who willingly underwent this fusion ritual and now exist as a single, reconstituted being.)
Before Millie can flee, Jamie suddenly slashes her arm in the same place the men in the video cut themselves—initiating the first step of the process by force.
She escapes and returns home bleeding and terrified, to Tim who prepares to take his own life, unable to watch his lady die. She begs him to stop and in a moment of radical love, he presses his body to hers, fusing his own flesh to her wound, sealing it and their love. As Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” plays, they sway together, giving in to the transformation as they merge into a single, whole being.
Now, about that final scene.
Days later, Millie’s parents arrive for a weekend visit. The front door bears the same spooky symbol etched into the cave. When it opens, they’re greeted by a serene, androgynous figure with a warm smile. It’s Tim and Millie—or what remains of them. A small bell hangs by their door, a symbol of the cult, and a hint that the next fusion may have just arrived.
In Lorde-ian prose, “Baby, what was that?”
‘Together’ is now playing theaters everywhere.
