Just how far would you venture in the name of love and what are you willing to sacrifice to literally become one with your other half? New Australian body horror Together, directed by New Zealand-born and Melbourne-based independent filmmaker Michael Shanks, takes these queries to a whole new level when, adding a psychoanalytical twist and spin to the plot, he throws in thematic references to co-dependency to make for a rapidly critically acclaimed film that is the collaborative result of five production companies and that comes promoted and supported by VicScreen.
Released in July 2025, it has quickly garnered worldwide attention and was shown at the Sydney Film Festival, the SXSW Film & TV Festival, Sundance, and the Locarno International Film Festival. The twisted narrative of Together (where images of pupils dilated ad infinitum may not be as graphic as Buñuel’s 1920s iconic extreme closeup of a sliced eye yet they are as effective as can get in a film that explores the magnetic elasticity of irrevocable oneness and demonstrates how duality is no more if a couple share one mind, one thought, and become overly reliant on – and obsessed with – one another; desperately fearing potential loss and the threat of renewed singledom) shares commonalities with Zach Cregger’s Weapons (August 2025)[1] – with a main character (Gladys Lilly) inspired by Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968)[2] – and critically acclaimed forerunner of all forerunners, hardcore The Substance (2024), which had spectators running for the door and becomes a grotesque comment on the “monstrous-feminine” (Barbara Creed).[3]
All three movies play with notions of sanity and insanity, reality and surreality and demonstrate just how much we are craving twisted narratives – and when it comes to body horror the imagination of the cinematic creator knows no bounds. Cronenberg’s teleportation experiment gone wrong (Kafkaesque The Fly, 1986) already laid the groundwork for future spinoffs on the symbiotically macabre.
As if our dire reality was not enough, as spectators we are desperately keen to venture beyond our existential bleakness and the sad situation of the world today, and into the murky shadowlands of cinematic fear where a heightened sense of discomfort is felt on a both physical and psychological level. And fiction becomes our omnipresent parallel reality in which, as spectators, we are voyeuristically driven by our “desire to see and hear”.[4]
Why our fascination with Gore, the Grotesque and the Macabre and the need to stretch our imagination beyond the (no longer) humanly impossible? “Nothing grabs our attention like violence”[5] and, more metaphorically, “Life begins at the end of our comfort zone”.
Anything that tests our limits and forces us out into the darkness and off the beaten track. In the compact depths of the movie theatre, where our collective focus is on what takes place in front of us, our deepest fears find their release and as we let out a primordial scream we step into the nightmare together.
The dystopian underworld that dwells beneath the reassuring daylight just prior, becomes an intense twilight zone where real crazy things happen as soon as the sun sets – and for what seems like a really long time. In this space where anything can happen, our mind on high alert is open to all senses, including the sixth, and shapes its own narrative.
Alfred Hitchcock, Master of Suspense who showed just enough in Psycho (1960), once famously declared: “I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen,” Fast-forward to today it has been argued, also from a gaming point of view that:
Horror is an artform, an artform painted through the lens of the camera. This artform involves the skilful application of creative angles, and framing, through which directors or game creators craft a visual language of fear that, at its best, triggers our deepest primal emotions.[6]
Hitchcock got it right alright and was sophisticated by today’s horror standards, where we may ask what is so aesthetically pleasing about graphic images of a face repeatedly bashed and beaten to a pulp in both weaponizing and victimizing Weapons, and The Substance, which relentlessly scrutinises body dysmorphia and where we shockingly realise just how far the (female) director is willing to go to get her already clear gender-political message and statement across (this “beautifully grotesque” movie, as one audience reviewer puts it, seems to have picked up on a thing or two from highly controversial Midsummer where disabled characters, in turn, are portrayed as abhorrent and “monstrous”. The Guardian argues that the 2019 film’s “ableism resurrects the dark history of eugenics-inspired horror”[7]).
And why the unrestrained directorial fascination with cancerous-looking protagonists who lash out at everything that moves? Wherein lies our morbid pleasure with watching all this with delight and how did we allow ourselves to stoop to this sickening level? Is this ethically justifiable and is body horror form and content part of its own particular aesthetics? And if we scale it all down to basic, are we, in fact, more attractive as our ghostly skeletal selves than as humans in flesh and blood?
Together, a psychological thriller more than anything, effectively creeps under the skin and contributes to a tradition of Australian horror steeped in an outlandish landscape[8] – with Australian New Wave Wake in Fright (1971) and latter Wolf Creek (2005) raising the bar as cinematic masterpieces.
Shank’s film has a documentary feel to it and adds a sectarian spice to a fast-paced narrative that has its own take on the ghostly bizarre but that differs from stereotypical body horror through its metaphorical aspirations and its interest in human interaction and (non)communication. As critic Stephen Romei of The Australian explains, “[w]hat [this supernatural film] does so well is it takes common relationship issues and morphs them into a horror film”.[9]
Together stands out in its ability to go further, to probe deeper, and to force us to look into the abyss that is our own soul; our soul as it has become affected by the not so unfamiliar Other.
The beauty of TOGETHERness? – a commentary on contemporary cinematic body horror
Words: Dr Jytte Holmqvist
Images: Together (dir. Michael Shanks) – courtesy of Kismet Movies | Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger) – courtesy of Warner Bros. | Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960) | Alison Brie and Dave Franco in Together (dir. Michael Shanks) – courtesy of Kismet Movies
Footnotes:
[1] Stephen King allegedly tweeted “WEAPONS. Confidently told, and very scary. I loved it.”
[2] www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/movies/amy-madigan-weapons-aunt-gladys.html
[3] Misha Ketchell argues that “The Substance takes a leaf out of Creed’s book by proposing a feminist critique of female experience through the visceral language of the body horror, a sub-genre preoccupied with the transformation, destruction or grotesque exaggeration of the human body.” theconversation.com
[4] Bill Nichols, Visible Fictions: Cinema: television: video (1982), p. 81.
[7] Emma Madden adds: “Rather than pornography, there is no film genre so concerned with the body, nor of gouging a reaction from it, than horror.” www.theguardian.com
[8] The revived interest in the genre means “Australian filmmakers [leave] their blooded fingerprints over the horror genre” notes Stephen Romei. See: www.youtube.com