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Alison Brie and Dave Franco have been married for nearly 10 years, but new body horror movie Together is the first time they've played a couple on screen. Their characters, elementary school teacher Millie and 30-something aspiring musician Tim (heavy on the "aspiring"), aren't married, though, much to Millie's chagrin.
She thinks Tim isn't motivated enough, in their relationship or his own life, and she's worried that they're only still together for convenience. He's been emotionally and sexually distant since a traumatic family incident, and Millie isn't sure how much more distance she can take. Tim has a pretty good idea of how she feels and resents her for it, but still, the pair decide to pack up their lives and move out of the city for Millie's new job in a rural small town. What could be better for a resentment-breeding relationship than forcing one party to pack up their life and start afresh somewhere they don't really want to be?
Throw yourself in
The various images of merging body parts in the movie's marketing give us a taste of Together's fair share of gross moments – it is a body horror flick, after all. But it's also very funny, as you might expect with two actors at the helm with an impressive roster of sitcoms and studio comedies under their belts. "It's not a jokey movie. It's not like we're throwing out a bunch of one-liners," Franco tells GamesRadar+ when we sit down with him and Brie in London.
"It's more [that] our characters are in the most ridiculous scenarios you can imagine, and then we played it very straight and very grounded, and hopefully the comedy comes from that. It's nice when a horror movie gives you permission to laugh and be in on the joke, and isn't too self-serious."
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Both lead roles demand very physical performances from their actors as Tim and Millie's bodies start to take on minds of their own, and Brie and Franco threw themselves into the challenge – literally. "My first foray into being more physical did start with physical comedy, and then I realized how much I love involving my body in my work and I've basically just amped it up ever since," Brie says. "In comedy and horror, there's no place for vanity. We're not worried about how we look when we're in these crazy positions. You really have to give yourself over to the stakes of the situation."
"It's really just about throwing yourself around with abandon and seeing what happens," Franco, whose body repeatedly ricochets off the tiled wall of a shower cubicle in one particularly wince-worthy scene, adds. "It's not like we choreographed these moments in very specific ways. It's more like, go nuts and let's just see how weird it can get, and I think that's the same with comedy… The more unpredictable it is, even to yourself, the better."
Bodily horrors
There have been plenty of great body horror movies made over the past few decades, but these have tended to be smaller, independent or international films like Julia Ducournau's Raw. Associations with the genre are still, for the most part, entangled with David Cronenberg's '80s heyday (think Jeff Goldblum in The Fly). But now, with The Substance getting a nomination for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, it seems like body horror is having a moment in the mainstream.
"Body horror is such an interesting genre," says Brie. "Your body is the one thing that you can never escape, right? A lot of people have very complicated relationships with their body. Our bodies are always changing and growing. We're getting older. There's unstoppable forces that are pulling at your body at all times. So while people think of it as a niche genre, I actually think it's so universal and relatable to everybody, and something like The Substance is so exciting because it really brought body horror into the contemporary conversation, whereas it kind of lived in the '70s and '80s prior to now."
Franco agrees, adding, "You can use these movies that are very extreme to deal with very universal issues, like with The Substance and aging, with our film and codependency, and you can just tackle them in a very visceral way."
And, ultimately, that's what Tim and Millie are: codependent. When Millie proposes to Tim during their going-away party in the movie's opening scene, he hesitates for several beats too many, mortifying her. When they call each other "babe", which is more often than you can count, the term of endearment has never felt so empty. At times, it seems like they can barely stand to be in the same room together. And yet, neither can imagine a life without the other.
As the film progresses, the couple are brought closer together (figuratively and literally) by their rapidly deteriorating situation, but it feels somewhat unearned: they're not overcoming their relationship issues; they're just distracted by a much scarier, grosser issue. But Brie hopes that audiences find something sympathetic in Tim and Millie's story, despite it all.
"I do think the trick of this movie is that even though these characters are at odds for the first half of the film, through the challenges that they face – to put it mildly – we do see how they can work as a couple," she says. "So I do hope that people are rooting for them."
"But," Franco concedes, "you're not wrong if you think it's dreadful at the end."
Together is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on August 15. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
