There are many horrifying practical effects in Together, the new relationship horror: cracking joints, fusing flesh, conjoined monsters. But nothing reaches the true terror of the Williamsburg hipster curly mullet sported by Dave Franco’s character.
The debut feature from writer/director Michael Shanks screened at South by Southwest after being acquired by Neon and opened in cinemas on Friday. The story of a New York couple (real-life couple Franco and Alison Brie) moving to the country and finding an unexpected test of their relationship, it’s a movie that’s either a romance or a horror, depending on how you look at it. While it has elements of a “fun, wild boy horror,” Shanks said, “one of the goals in the script was, that if you stripped all the horror set pieces out, that there would hopefully be a compelling relationship drama at the center.” He did that by channeling a lot of “personal specificity into the script from my own relationship, my own anxieties, and some personal trauma as well.”
That includes the terrible haircut sported by Tim (Franco), a former musician who is putting his dreams on hold when his partner, Millie (Brie), gets a job in a rural school district. “I’ve had that haircut more than a few times,” Shanks said, and admitted that Tim was very much based in himself, down to the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard t-shirt. “I recorded albums of music back in the day and was trying to do the whole band thing.” Tim’s look was solidified when Shanks and Franco discussed who he was trying to be and realized that Tim aspires to be Damon Albarn. In recent photos of the Blur frontman, Shanks observed, “he has that modern Brooklyn mullet and we thought, ‘Yeah, this is that guy.’”
For Brie, the mullet became a character point about Tim. “It’s so true to that hipster musician …”
“… indie wannabe rock star who is holding on to his fame from the past,” Franco continued. “And the mullet is the full representation of this thing that he is holding on to that he should probably let go.”
The mullet is just one in a long series of questionable haircuts that Franco has had to adopt for many different projects (right now he’s sporting “this straggly goatee” for a new film ) and that means living with any look for a long time. Sometimes, that’s longer than he expects.
Together was originally supposed to film before the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, and Franco had already grown his hair out when the industry shut down. He said, “I figured, ‘Oh, god, I’ll keep this cut because we don’t know how long they’re gonna last,’ and jumping ahead, essentially at the end of the day I had that haircut for nine months.” As soon as filming on Together wrapped, he was ready to dump the mullet, “but I got a call from Seth Rogen and his producing partner, Evan Goldberg, offering me a part in their TV show, The Studio, where I was going to be playing a New York gangster in the Seventies, and they go, ‘Can you keep the haircut for a little bit longer? I think it would work for the part.’ So I ended up keeping it for an extra three weeks until we filmed that. I had that thing for nearly a year. You’re welcome.”
“It’s very sweet of her to embrace disgusting looks of mine.”
“It’s very sweet of her to embrace disgusting looks of mine,” added Franco.
That said, Brie has her own tonsorial sins to which she must confess. “I had a perm for three seasons of GLOW, a real perm, a shag haircut, so you to put up with that.” Even her current haircut comes from Together. “I did cut these bangs for the film,” she said. “I was like, ‘Millie needs bangs. She needs to be hiding a little bit in her hair.’ But now I’ve embraced them.”
“Which I love,” smiled Franco.
Shanks said he saw Together as equal parts Seventies relationship drama, Eighties body horror, and “a Simpsons’ Halloween episode.” However, he wanted to avoid any sense of kitsch, instead relying on the characters and situation to both ground the story and give it a sense of humor. Shanks said. “We’ve all been with couples that snip at each other and bicker, and that’s an irritating thing, and I never wanted to forget that that’s a fundamental part of the story even when we’re in the crazier moments.”
The end result is definitely a Rorschach test for audiences. Brie said, “This movie will reflect back to audiences their own feelings about relationships and monogamy.”
Franco added, “We’ve talked to single people who say this is a strong argument for staying single, and then we talked to a couple who had been fighting all week and then they saw the film and they said it helped them make up.”
“Even at the premiere afterparty,“ Brie said, “two people came up to us and one said, ‘At the end of the movie I was sobbing.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘Because I want to find love like that,’ and the guy with her said, ‘I thought it was horrifying.’ I said, ‘Guys, I don’t think you two should stay together.’”
“[It’s about] the insidious nature of these codependent relationships.”
Brie described the story as being about “the insidious nature of these codependent relationships. … You’re watching this couple who [are] in a rut, to say the least, and really at odds during the first half of the movie, but at its core, in terms of story, as we see them take on these challenges that they are affecting them in the film. They are forced to work together and become one. The physical side is one part, but emotionally they connect a lot more.”
For Shanks, there wasn’t any issue for him as a director in working with a married couple, especially as the couple had been actively involved as producers for over a year before filming started, “so by the time we got on set the three of us knew the film forwards and backwards.” Instead, he said, “It was a strange frontier to be working with actors I’ve watched since I was a teenager. That was the weirdness for me. ‘I can’t believe I’m working with Dave and Alison.’”
Together is in theatres now from Neon. Find screenings and showtimes here.
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.
