2025 Sundance Film Festival Review: Together
Dave Franco and Alison Brie star in Michael Shanks’s deliriously fun horror film Together, one of the best movies I have seen at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Franco and Brie play Tim and Millie, a couple who have recently moved from out of the big city into a house surrounded by endless woods. Tim and Millie’s relationship is on the rocks. Millie’s job as a teacher has taken them out of the city. Tim was once part of a band and is struggling to still live the rockstar life. They don’t have sex anymore and there are no plans of getting married, despite Millie’s best efforts. While exploring their new surroundings, they fall into a cave, triggering a supernatural incident that alters their relationship and physical form.
Writer/director Michael Shanks starts the film brilliantly. Together opens in the forest near where Tim and Millie will be moving to with a search party looking for a pair of campers who have gone missing. A pair of search dogs go into a cave, the same cave Tim and Millie fall into later in the film, and they drink water from a mysterious pool in the cave. Moments later, the dogs begin to act strange, and then something horrifying happens. Shanks is using Alfred Hitchcock’s Ticking Bomb analogy here. We quickly understand that the cave is strange and the water inside of it has consequences when drunk. When Tim and Millie go into the cave and are looking for water to drink, the tension is ramped up and it turns into one of those “don’t do it!” yelling at the screen moments. Once they are out of the cave, we are never at ease because we are waiting for the effects of the water to take place. This is smart writing and directing from Shanks because it keeps us invested in the characters’ outcomes and keeps us on edge to see what will happen to Tim and Millie.
Together is one of the best movies I have seen at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival because of how well it works within different genres. As a horror film, it is spectacular. It features body-horror elements, jump scares, weird creatures, and people bending in disturbing ways. The film has a great pace that allows for the story to build suspense and lead up to an off-the-rails ending that features blood, gore, and chaos. The horror is coupled with tons of humor, with quick one-liners coming from our leads and some great physical comedy as well. At the film’s core is a compelling relationship drama about a couple on the rocks trying to stay together. All of these are firing on cylinders and are perfectly balanced. It also helps Franco and Brie both give their best cinematic performances to date. The two of them, who are married in real life, have excellent chemistry which helps guide the relationship drama and both can flex their comedic muscles, which we mostly know them for, while also showing a dramatic side we haven’t seen from them before.
Together is a delightfully sinister movie. It’s a creepy, bloody, consistently surprising, well-made horror film.
Together premiered in the Midnight category at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Follow Kevflix on Twitter, Instagram, Letterboxd, @kevflix, and Facebook by searching Kevflix.
