Horror love stories usually ask if you’d die for someone. Michael Shanks’ debut Together asks this though: would you lose yourself completely? And he means it literally: flesh peeling, skin dissolving.

Caught this at a late screening after it premiered in Thai cinemas back in August. Alison Brie and Dave Franco (married in real life, which adds this weird meta layer) play a couple whose relationship drama turns into actual body horror. Not the jump-scare kind. The kind that gets under your skin metaphorically as viewers and literally on screen.

The setup’s almost boringly familiar at first: couple relocation, relationship fraying. You know the drill. Except then something supernatural starts happening to their bodies, and suddenly “we need space” becomes the most brutally literal thing, because they physically cannot stay apart at all.

Spoilers incoming because there’s no way around this.

Flesh to Flesh

These two literally start adhering to each other in proper body horror territory. They are literally hacking bits off themselves to maintain some distance, only to find their bodies gravitating back together like magnets. The domestic bickering you would expect becomes secondary to this growing physical horror of losing where “me” ends and “us” begins.

It is co-dependency made flesh and bloody. All those psychological theories about losing yourself in a relationship are made literal. Every grotesque scene reflects that slow psychological dissolution when someone becomes your entire world. Except here you can actually see it happening, skin cell by skin cell.

I would say the genius is in how familiar it all feels before it turns alien. Your partner’s touch, what could be more ordinary? But what if you could not escape it? What if intimacy became a cage made of your own flesh?

And this is not torture porn or cheap thrills 

Every “disgusting” transformation is emotional and plot important: two people trying to work out how to love each other without completely consuming one another. The ending does not offer easy answers either. Love requires constant negotiation between togetherness and selfhood, and sometimes that negotiation can get very ugly and weird.

What gets me is not the gore or jump scares, it is recognising ourselves in the nightmare. That stomach-dropping vertigo feeling when you realise you’ve lost your own grip while trying to hang onto someone else? That is the kind of existential dread that sticks with you (unforgettable if it has ever happened) and a little warning you cannot shake if it comes from this watch.

What’s brilliant about the best relationship horror

is how it weaponises intimacy itself. We are supposed to be vulnerable with people we love, but there is always that terrifying moment where vulnerability tips into dissolution. One day you are compromising on what movie to watch, next thing you know you cannot remember what you actually liked before you met them.

The weirdest part

is how intoxicating losing yourself can feel while it’s happening. There is something almost romantic about the idea of “becoming one” with someone, until you realise that usually just means one person disappears. And if you haven’t figured out self-love first, it’s even trickier. You start bending, adjusting, shrinking pieces of yourself without noticing, thinking it’s all part of the connection, until one day you can’t remember who you were before. It is like an emotional quicksand: by the time you notice you are sinking, you are already neck-deep.

With all said and done, by the end I was squirming, partly grossed out but mostly thinking about just how easy it is to lose yourself while trying to stay together.