Together (2025)

Direction: Michael Shanks
Country: Australia / USA

Together, a fairly entertaining supernatural body-horror film, marks the feature debut of Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks, who also designed the visual effects while drawing on his own relationships and fears.

Elementary school teacher Millie Wilson (Alison Brie) and aspiring musician Tim Brassington (Dave Franco) are a young couple whose once-solid bond has grown wobbly and cold. Hoping to repair it, they move into a creaky old countryside house. But after a bizarre hike in the woods, their lives take a terrifying turn, haunted by supernatural forces that relentlessly test their physical and psychological limits.

Together plays like a cross between Alien and Cronenberg’s dark films, yet it punctuates the dread with funny, ironic, and even embarrassing moments—keeping the entertainment value high. With flashes of originality and visual flair, it manages to stand out in the crowded horror-romance field by offering something unusually gripping and radical.

Brie and Franco, married in real life, convey both intimacy and discomfort effectively, navigating between marital tension and carnal nightmare with ease. The couple had previously shared the screen in Franco’s The Rental (2020), and here their chemistry grounds the film even when the story spins into excess. Together is one of those immediate audience-grabbers that, even when veering into absurdity, remains undeniably fun.

The Shrouds (2025)

Direction: David Cronenberg
Country: USA 

David Cronenberg wrote The Shrouds in response to the death of his wife in 2017. Despite this deeply personal origin, the film’s uninspired delirium begins with a promisingly tense atmosphere only to unravel into something muddled and ultimately hollow. The Canadian filmmaker returns to his signature obsessions—mutilation fused with macabre romanticism, fixation on death and the body, espionage, and futuristic technology. eXistenZ (1999) and Crash (1996) naturally come to mind, yet this time the concoction feels undercooked, lacking soul, coherence, and genuine emotional weight.

The plot follows an inconsolable corpse voyeur (Vincent Cassel, in his third collaboration with Cronenberg) who harbors a disturbing fascination with his late wife’s body and cemeteries. However, the story quickly gets bogged down in contrived, exhausting dialogue and stilted staging. Delivered at a glacial pace, the bland narrative nearly lulled me to sleep. Adding to the confusion is the film’s tech subplot, clouded by mysterious hackers and vague conspiracy theories involving Chinese and Russian corporations.

Whatever suspense the film tries to build evaporates almost instantly. What a futile and misguided movie this is! - certainly one of Cronenberg’s biggest flops to date. At 82, one has to wonder if Cronenberg has lost his touch—both in direction and in his ability to truly engage the viewer, as mortuary enigma mutates into incoherent drivel.