To say the global economy is in shambles borders on a truism. Most people are tightening their belts, and this informs everything from their grocery list to their love lives. Nearly 25% of couples in the US stay together because of financial pressures, according to a recent survey. It’s no wonder, then, that major horror films increasingly examine how relationships buckle under stressors like these.

Sketch-comedy director Michael Shanks’s debut feature, TOGETHER, follows a couple in the middle of a corrosive transition. Tim Brassington (Dave Franco) and Millie Wilson (Alison Brie) decide to pack up from their urban apartment and move to a small town to pursue Millie’s dream of being a schoolteacher. Tim is a meek, self-effacing and resentful burnout, obsequiously shelving his dreams of pursuing a music career to prioritise his relationship and move out to the boonies with Millie. Millie is a warm but imposing personality, vocally supportive of Tim, but also unable to hide her scorn for his lacklustre commitment in their relationship.

When the pair decide to go on a hike in their new neighbourhood, they fall into a cavern that appears to be fused with parts of a chapel, a mysterious pool at its centre, formerly used by a cult. After drinking the water to survive the night in the cave, the couple wake to find their bodies sticking together. In the days to follow, Tim and Millie grapple with the visceral implications of fusing their lives too closely together.

Shanks’s previous work directing sketch comedy bubbles up in the script and screenplay at times. Brie’s background as an absurd and unnerving sweetheart in sitcoms and Franco’s past roles as a petulant trust fund kid with unearned swagger in blockbuster comedies are difficult to forget throughout. Nothing is really wrong with their casting, but Franco and Brie are also credited among the producing team here. Why the film wasn’t made an outright horror comedy is unclear, considering the creative leads’ historical strengths.

How Tim’s uncertainty shapes the relationship becomes a running joke throughout: Millie oscillates between calling Tim her “boyfriend” and her “partner” until she eventually lets out the malapropism “boypartner” in conversation with her neighbour-colleague, Jamie McCabe (Damon Herriman). It’s in these linguistic slips and dual roles that TOGETHER’s central metaphor becomes apparent.

“At every turn, there are visible, audible, verbal, and plot cues loudly announcing the film’s core conceit: romantic relationships, as much as they might be pedestaled, operate by violently erasing the individuals within them.”

Everything from the script to the opening credits hammers on the idea that the very language surrounding love and romance morbidly merges two entities into one. The opening credits show two translucent layers of each name overlapping until they unify. Pursuing a lingering stench in the new house, Tim finds a decaying rat king in the ceiling above a light fixture. At every turn, there are visible, audible, verbal, and plot cues loudly announcing the film’s core conceit: romantic relationships, as much as they might be pedestaled, operate by violently erasing the individuals within them.

TOGETHER executes its body horror in a way that seems cognisant of the broader pop horror milieu. Much of the film takes place in bright midday lighting evocative of MIDSOMMAR. The goriest moments reiterate that Cronenbergian special effects are back in vogue; the trajectory towards a single Chimaeric monster is a clear echo of THE SUBSTANCE. All told, though, the body horror in TOGETHER still manages to carve out its own style. One shocking shot of Tim’s stretched-out penis, as Tim struggles to unstick from Millie, is (unfortunately) lasting.

Technically, though, there is little else to praise here. Efforts to plant and pay off props that will reappear in splatter scenes are so blunt they verge on comedic fourth-wall breaks. Tim, brandishing an electric saw, looks over his shoulder, almost directly into the camera, and jokes about his ineptitude with it. Legibility over subtlety is not necessarily a weakness, but TOGETHER’s oily subject and watery execution seem to be immiscible. The film expresses a sincere fear that romantic entanglements are corrupting, noxious, and gradually so. That slow change prevents those within it from noticing the mutation until their lives are already irrevocably mixed. As Millie says early on, “If we don’t split now, it’ll only be harder later.”

Why would splitting be harder later? The statement foreshadows the relationship’s horrific transmogrification, of course, but another significant reason is that their finances are linked, even if social factors might influence a couple’s decision to stay together. Romantic relationships are in no small part structured around the economics of two people’s lives. TOGETHER never addresses the idea that money matters can stink up an otherwise sweet bouquet of romance and sex, which holds it back from being a fully resonant depiction of middle-class relationships in the twenty-first century.

“Something, somewhere, between the script, the set, and the film’s central metaphors seems to have gotten lost.”

Tim and Millie seem above finances in a solidly upper-middle-class station, moving into a resplendent, late-Victorian behemoth of a home with no income but Millie’s public teacher salary. Everything from the way the couple dresses to their occupations suggests they are not rich. Something, somewhere, between the script, the set, and the film’s central metaphors seems to have gotten lost. This vacuum does evacuate the film of its horror, because the most powerful spectre that hangs over partnerships like Millie’s and Tim’s is not only absent, but entirely unacknowledged here. This isn’t to say that TOGETHER’s essential thesis never resonates at all. However, the film conspicuously swerves around not only one of, but the core anxiety affecting its audience’s perception of romance.

Where it lands, instead, is in a juvenile and incongruous spot: unspoken wealth (or some other mysterious force) guards this couple from financial anxiety. And yet they continue to argue about one lacking a driver’s license or the other not knowing how to cook. The question that hovers over the film, throughout, is: if they’re not in the red, why don’t they just break up? The fact that there is no answer to this question in the film makes the relationship seem like a rich person’s relationship naively superimposed onto an entirely different kind.

Because it’s impossible not to draw a parallel between Tim and Millie’s relationship to their actors’ real-world marriage, it’s also impossible not to wonder if Franco’s and Brie’s own wealthier class positions, coupled with their involvement in the film’s creative leadership, might have blended factual bias into fiction. In light of ongoing plagiarism accusations, which, if credible, point to Franco and Brie ripping off a different script as their own highly similar hybrid one, parsing out the relationship between creators and characters seems more relevant than ever.

An attempt to sniff out a deep-seated, tangled web of fear in society that amounts to very little, TOGETHER makes an ambitious leap towards heady metaphors, but fails to fuse itself to an otherwise exciting and provocative emerging canon in horror cinema.