Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s new film, Together, premiered at Sundance to considerable buzz, hailed as a surreal blend of romance and body horror, but it didn’t take long for the applause to be shadowed by accusations. StudioFest producers behind the 2023 indie film, Better Half, filed a federal lawsuit alleging the movie is a blatant rip-off of their original concept, one that also centered on a couple who, through mysterious circumstances, become physically fused together, a grotesque metaphor for the perils of emotional enmeshment. The lawsuit details eerie similarities. Both stories use Plato’s myth of missing halves as a narrative spine, both stage their climax to the Spice Girls’, “2 Become 1,” spinning on a record player, and both turn a private relationship dynamic into a fleshy, blood-soaked spectacle. Franco and Brie, who co-wrote and produced the film with director, Michael Shanks, insist that Together was developed independently from a draft Shanks completed in 2019, long before Brie and Franco were allegedly approached about Better Half. Whether this is a strange coincidence or an ethical breach is something the legal system will determine.
What’s undeniable is that both films tap into the same haunting idea: what happens when love dissolves the borders of the self? Codependency, a term often diluted into memes and self-help jargon, gets an unflinchingly literal interpretation in these stories. It’s not just about clinginess or insecurity. True codependency is a loss of autonomy, where identity blurs into the other person until separateness feels like death. On screen, that dynamic takes on terrifying flesh. In Together, Tim and Millie, played with queasy intimacy by Franco and Brie, retreat to a remote cabin only to wake up physically joined, limbs and torsos grotesquely merged. Their predicament begins as a comic inconvenience. Shared trips to the bathroom and awkward attempts to move in sync soon become an escalating nightmare of pain, control, and surrender. The body horror is explicit, but the metaphor underneath is even more disturbing. When we fall in love, do we secretly crave this obliteration of boundaries, or is it the very thing that destroys us?
Audiences have long been fascinated by relationship horror, but the obsession has intensified in recent years with films like Fresh, Swallow, Men, and Speak No Evil. These stories strip intimacy of its soft edges, recasting romance as a stage for control, violence, and the terror of dependency. In an era defined by dating apps, hookup culture, and endless self-curation, viewers seem drawn to the inverse fantasy. What happens when the carefully maintained distance collapses and we merge into one another? (Literally.) Together weaponizes that fear, offering a grotesque vision of love as both salvation and suffocation.
Franco and Brie have joked that making the movie made them “more codependent than ever,” but behind the humor is a real tension about communication, intimacy, and identity. Both as artists and spouses, their partnership becomes part of the text, turning the film into an symbol foe self-reflection and spectacle. Whether Together is an audacious original or an ethical misstep disguised in body horror remains unresolved, but its thematic audacity is undeniable. It forces us to confront the dark side of devotion, asking if love’s ultimate fantasy, the idea of molding into each other, might also be its ultimate curse.
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