In 2021, Julia Ducournau followed her unsettling debut, Raw (2016), up with the equally surprising Titane. A shocking film that followed the twisted journey of a young woman after she has sex with a car at the auto show where she is working on a gig, it left audiences appalled and utterly confounded. With Titane, Ducournau established her credentials as a veritable body horror exponent.
Earlier this year, the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat showed up in popular imagination with a bang. Her film, The Substance, starring a sublime Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, created a shocking, grisly, horrific cautionary tale of lust for youth. And now, Kiwi filmmaker Michael Shanks’ Together is in theatres, a simplistic film about a quarrelling couple who begin to feel a paranormal corporeal hunger to fuse after they get trapped in a subterranean cave and drink water from a cursed pool.
Suddenly, it seems like body horror is everywhere, at least in the post-pandemic world. Which makes me wonder how Together, an intermittently thought-provoking new film about the pitfalls of—well, nothing—doesn’t really manage to scare you. As is often the case with most horror films now, the film at various stages begins to look like an indictment on one thing or another (I was torn between co-dependency and the apparent rush couples feel to break up at the drop of a hat). It flirts with cult territory and then settles for a fantastical but mediocre resolution.
You may also like
The problem, I’m guessing, is with the film’s tonality. At many junctures, it assumes a comedic flavour, all the while dancing around drab romance tropes. A weird sex scene inside a primary lavatory stall. Franco telling Brie that Valium is now called Diazepam in the middle of a desperate struggle to separate after having half-fused together. Brie sawing their fused arms apart the morning after (with zero repercussions). The film’s undecided on whether it wants to be a subversion of attachment or an ironic horror comedy. Or a Sayaka Murata novel.
There’s something to be said about how the effort to be smart (or worse, correct) ruins horror. Horror needs to be camp, like Carrie, like Videodrome, like Eraserhead to some extent. This is why The Substance worked despite also coming with a message. It’s because the genre demands submission—the viewer cannot feel smug about how beneath the layer of malevolence, lies a societal issue. They must bow down before the gnarly and perverse complication of consciousness that horror represents. It’s voluntary torture on harmony, sensibility and peace.
One good example of this could be Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 film The Skin I Live In. An extremely disturbing first watch, the film follows Richard Ledgard, a reputed plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) whose research and work have brought him a Frankenstein-like reputation. After his daughter is r*ped by an street junkie, he abducts the perpetrator and confines him, sedating him and slowly altering his physical state into that of a woman. The politics of the film may be said to be heavily off-the-mark, but that’s where it’s truly terrifying. The revelation that the mysterious woman he’s kept confined is a man who Ledgard has transformed surgically into a female, is of a horrific nature. Why Ledgard would do this to a man who r*ped his daughter remains a morally dubious question that adds to this film’s inherent horror. Body horror then becomes an instrument for internalised horror.
You may also like
All along, Together maintains the promise of this new wave of social commentary-led supernatural cinema, and falters in the end when Tim and Millie have a bloody heart-to-heart towards the close of the film. Millie asks Tim not to slit his throat for her to live; Tim plugs the gash in her arm by holding it close and letting the two bodies fuse. They go home and accept that they must become one (like Plato suggested, their creepy neighbour earlier hinted)—capitulating like the rhinoceroses of Ionesco. Through a long, amorous embrace, they fuse together one final time.
The other feature that riddles Together is the overexposure to body horror as a genre: gory visuals and graphic details are nothing new in a new, digital-forward world. As Tim and Millie slowly and frustratingly realise what’s happening to them, the film’s panic starts resembling the fitful excitement of a zombie comedy. It ends up as a combination of decelerators that prevent the monstrosity from looking monstrous enough.
In the closing sequence, Tim and Millie begin dancing to 2 Become 1 by Spice Girls—because they’re literally becoming one! Oh, and also because it’s supposed to be from Millie’s favourite album, which the film reveals to us in the opening sequence of their story. A tender, tender moment of romantic unification for these two people that haven’t agreed on one thing for most of the film—and you might be sold, too. As expected by now, they fuse to become one androgynous whole: a new being who answers the door when Millie’s parents do come knocking for their Sunday lunch. Is it sardonic? Is it romantic? Is it subversive? You won’t know—unless you paid attention to the bell hanging above their door. It’s a cult horror.