Stuck on you: "Together"

To begin on a positive note, the current horror renaissance is pumping more variety into the multiplex than there has been for some while; one of the advantages of medium-to-low-budget filmmaking is that it attracts different types of creatives who will have different ideas on how best to spend the money. (Contrast that with those megabudget productions bolted together in the $100m+ bracket by MBA-enabled alphas, which have tended to look and sound the same.) Nestling alongside the rollercoaster ride of Weapons and the genuinely traumatising Bring Her Back, Michael Shanks' Australian-shot Together is the horror idea of a date movie, though it also clearly intends to be a cautionary tale of some kind: its prologue outlines the circumstances whereby dogs deployed in a search party for a missing couple end up fused at the neck. What follows is an extended bad joke about an upwardly mobile couple (Alison Brie and Dave Franco, a real-life item) who would appear far removed from such animalistic concerns. He's a musician who's put his career on hold in favour of comfortable domesticity; she's a teacher who seems to regard him as a pet project. They've settled into a new life in a leafy outpost, but Shanks subjects them to stutters and stumbles that accentuate the ups-and-downs inherent in almost all couplings: a botched proposal, an erratic sex life, and - most disastrously of all - a hiking expedition rerouted when the pair tumble into a cave that represents their fear of being alone, isolated, abandoned. If the movies teach us anything, it's that bad things happen to Francos in caves - though Dave doesn't lose a limb, as his brother James had to in 127 Hours, so much as gain a vestigial tail in the form of his significant other.

The question that kept popping into my head through the film that follows was this: whose fears are being dramatised here, exactly? Couples confident in their codependency will surely take one look at this merging flesh and think hell yeah, bring it on. (Here's a film that means to go against three decades of aural evidence and convince us that Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You" should be thought of as spinechilling rather than seductive, a song to be fled from, not fucked to.) My feeling was that Shanks is really targeting young male singletons who've read hooey on the Internet about boys getting softer and more yielding in relationships, or about the effects of oestrogen in the water supply, usually in articles sponsored by Tate Brothers energy drinks or Trump whisky. The whiff of conservatism coming off Together is strong even before the late-film revelation that shruggingly makes a married gay couple the human villains of the piece; Shanks has hardened the gloopy Reagan-era subversion of Brian Yuzna's Society by injecting it with the ultramodern poisons of 4Chan and the evangelical Right. The ideology proves stronger than the plotting, in any event; the rules of this game prove sketchy, when not outright arbitrary. The couple are stranded in this cave until... they just get out? The lovers are subject to quasi-magnetic attraction until... it just switches off, like their cabin's erratic WiFi? (Don't get me started on Franco's ability to pull trig points from the metadata on a Facebook photo.) An even bigger problem is that I just didn't buy this relationship as defined: you have to care for this pair as a couple in order to care what happens to them, and the couple I saw here was from the off a nonstarter, a pair of idiots headed towards a terrible fate even before they gulp down gay-tainted water that scrambles their DNA.

I wondered if Together would have worked better if the actors at its centre weren't themselves a couple, and thus had to work twice as hard to persuade us there was something here worth pursuing (and salvaging). You can see what, for Brie and Franco, must have presented as both challenge (to play a couple with issues) and temptation (all-expenses trip Down Under with your sweetheart), but in the absence of any greater wisdom about relationships, Shanks takes their characters' bond as a given, and assumes we'll do likewise. Instead, with everybody's creative energies going on trying to keep this plot up and running, these kids are never allowed to be much more than regulation horror-movie test dummies being set up for a fall. (Nice of someone's dad to have left their electric saw lying around.) The movie that results is either patchy or sketchy because Shanks, in his excitement to sign off on his first horror feature, wants to cut to the gruey chase or because this is a metaphor that doesn't lend itself to easy scene-by-scene dramatisation: it's a striking image - two lovers merged like conjoined twins at head, arm or hip - more than it is a story begging to be told. Yes, it gets icky and sticky whenever it circles back to that image, and yes, Together eventually gets to its sniggering Spice Girls-enhanced punchline (which in itself reasserts the malign influence of memeland), but it also explains why everything between those recurring images feels such a stretch, a reach and, at certain junctures, a farcical flap. It's recognisably a film about love made by someone who's barely experienced it, and who may therefore have more to fear from it than most.

Together is now playing in cinemas nationwide.