No spoilers. Just see it.
Ok, so I’m a little late in writing about this…I’m finally catching up on articles I wanted to write and I hope to write about more horror movies moving forward.
Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes you remember why you love movies (and if you’re a horror fan, why you love horror movies in particular). Not because it's the most technically impressive thing you've ever seen, or because it has a $200 million budget (more like a $3 million budget here) and a franchise attached to it, but because somebody had a genuinely original idea and executed it with confidence, style, and a wicked sense of fun.
Together is that film. For me, it was the best of 2025. It was a great year for horror movies, so I don’t say it lightly.
What It's About (Without Ruining Anything)
Tim and Millie, well played by real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, are ten years into a relationship that has settled into that particular kind of comfortable friction most long-term couples will recognize. They love each other genuinely and completely, but familiarity has done what familiarity does. He's still chasing a music career at thirty-five. She's the practical one, holding things together, quietly losing patience with the whole arrangement. They relocate to the countryside in search of a reset.
What happens next is where the film earns its place in the body horror conversation (much like my favorite horror film of 2024, The Substance), but the less said about the specifics the better. The ending is perfect, so perfect that I wanted to re-watch the last 8 minutes or so, as soon as the credits started to roll.
See…no spoilers.
The Cast
Casting a real couple in a film about the terror and beauty of total devotion to another person was either an obvious call or a stroke of genius, possibly both. Franco and Brie have the kind of chemistry you simply cannot manufacture for a camera. You never doubt for a second that these two people love each other, which is exactly what the film needs to work. It stays grounded in genuine feeling, even when things get viscerally, gloriously wrong…and glorious it is.
Fans of Justified will get a kick out of Damon Herriman in a supporting role, and he delivers. If you know his work as Dewey Crowe the bumbling, almost lovable criminal in that show, you’ll enjoy seeing him play a completely opposite type of character here.
The Film It Reminded Me Of
Writer-director Michael Shanks clearly has a deep love for the genre and it shows throughout. The uneasy energy, the practical effects, the commitment to making the audience feel things physically as well as emotionally, all of it points to a filmmaker who grew up on the right movies.
Watching it, I kept thinking about The Devil's Rain (1975), that gloriously weird Ernest Borgnine cult horror film where bodies don't quite behave the way bodies should. Together has that same unsettling quality, the sense that the physical world is not as reliable as we assumed. And the body horror sequences themselves, the moments when flesh becomes something negotiable, carry echoes of Cronenberg'sThe Fly. Not derivative, not imitative, but clearly in conversation with that tradition.
What's remarkable is that despite all those reference points, Together feels completely like its own thing. You've seen body horror before. You haven't seen this and that should be celebrated.
Why It Works
Most horror films that try to balance genuine emotion with genre spectacle end up sacrificing one for the other. Either the scares undercut the relationship, or the relationship slows the scares. Together somehow does both at full volume simultaneously, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be.
There's also something genuinely funny about it, not in a way that deflates the tension but in a way that amplifies it. The film trusts its audience to laugh and be unsettled at the same time, which is a very specific skill and one Shanks has in abundance.
I often say that good horror movies typically do two of the following well: suspense, gore, laughs. At times, Together nailed all three.
And then there was the gore. I was thrilled to see they used mainly practical effects, prosthetic and some digital compositing, but limited CGI and no AI.
In an era of lazy CGI and AI, Together commits to the physical in a way that makes the more extreme sequences hit harder than any digital effect could. You feel them in your stomach. That’s how movie gore should be made…computer generated gore just has a way of sucking the fun right out of a horror movie. The audience I saw it with was equal parts groaning, shrieking and cheering, which is exactly the right reaction and why seeing a great horror movie in a theater is such a good time (assuming it’s not an empty theater, but that’s probably a topic for another article).
If you haven’t yet seen it, here’s the trailer…
The Bottom Line
Together premiered at Sundance 2025, quickly thereafter NEON acquired its distribution rights for a reported $17 million, and it generated the kind of word of mouth that follows a film through its theatrical and streaming release.
It's original and fun, and it's genuinely disturbing in the best possible way, and the ending sticks with you (pun intended).
So, yes…it’s my favorite horror film of 2025 with 28 Years Later and Weapons in a close tie for runners-up, maybe you’ll see them in a future article.
About The Author
Mike Meyerson is the founder of FEELING CREATIVE?, and has been a horror nut ever since Alien and The Exorcist gave him nightmares as a boy. Currently located in NY’s Hudson Valley Region, is always looking to build the network, find a new cool trail to hike and a new horror movie to watch.
Read Mike’s other articles - HERE.
