When we speak of union with the beloved, do we mean purification of the self alongside another, or the annihilation of the self under the guise of love? If union demands the erasure of individuality, the story no longer remains romantic or mystical – it becomes terrifying. In Together, love is indeed a unifying force, yet it is also the very mechanism by which individuality dissolves. Horror emerges precisely at this intersection.
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Warning: This review contains spoilers.
The Platonic Myth and the Logic of Horror
Early in Michael Shanks’s 2025 horror feature Together, Jamie (Damon Harriman) briefly invokes Plato. He recalls the myth of the original human – “a creature with four arms and four legs” – who was split in half by Zeus, condemned to spend its life searching for its missing other. Together takes this ancient metaphysical longing for unity and reframes it within the architecture of a horror drama.
The question is intriguing: How does Plato’s unifying myth – where every being in the sensible world yearns for its primordial form – find a new expression in a genre defined by dread, decay, and bodily dissolution?
Certainly, Plato never meant “union” in the sense of flesh merging grotesquely with another body. That union was spiritual, gentle, elevated. But what if the spiritual union were simply a refined name for the same horrible physical fusion? In the real world, total bodily union means certain death. If my body were to collide and merge with my lover’s – skin, muscle, bone interpenetrating – we would both cease to exist. And death, of course, is the backbone of horror.
This is where Plato unexpectedly enters the terrain of body horror.
When we speak of union with the beloved, do we mean purification of the self alongside another, or the annihilation of the self under the guise of love? If union demands the erasure of individuality, the story no longer remains romantic or mystical – it becomes terrifying. In Together, love is indeed a unifying force, yet it is also the very mechanism by which individuality dissolves. Horror emerges precisely at this intersection.
Objective Horror vs. Subjective Horror
The film opens with a search for a missing couple in the forest – an atmosphere reminiscent of crime thrillers and missing-person mysteries. The mise-en-scène signals danger: we expect murder, bloodshed, or violence. The early scares rely on familiar genre techniques. Nothing unusual – yet.
What is unusual is the source of fear.
Most horror films anchor dread in an external antagonist – a demon, a killer, a cursed object. The threat is objective. But Together centers on a pair of lovers, and the true horror arises from the lovers themselves or from the uncontrollable force of love circulating between them. This internalized terror can be understood as subjective horror.
There are no demons here. No murderer. No supernatural creature. Only love – distorted, amplified, and stripped of agency.
However, subjective horror rarely terrifies on its own. Fear requires a sense of vulnerability, a sudden loss of control – something that breaks the predictable flow of everyday life. Objective elements (a blade, a body, an external danger) often give form to the formless anxiety within.
In the film, terror takes shape the moment agency is ripped from the lovers. They become instruments of the love that inhabits them – forced toward one another, compelled into unwanted intimacy, driven into a lethal fusion that results in their deaths and the birth of a new entity.
From a Platonic perspective, the force of horror shifts from concrete threats in the sensible world (like murderers and demons) to the mythic Idea of Love itself – an idea acting independently of the lovers’ will.
The Cave Reimagined
In Plato’s philosophy, the concept of the cave refers to the environment in which human beings live within the sensible world. According to Plato, all humans are trapped inside a cave. Only a very small number may become curious enough to leave the cave and move toward the light, while the rest are deeply afraid of being freed from it and retreat into the cave for refuge.
The film’s equivalent to Plato’s cave appears as a ruined underground chapel, now a cavern hidden deep in the forest. Yet this cave does not imprison; it entraps in the beginning only to liberate at the end. It reveals itself only when the lovers have withdrawn far enough from society’s noise. The man sacrifices his share of water for the woman and drinks instead from the “spring of love” hidden at the bottom of the cave, unknowingly binding both lovers to a shared fate of dissolution.
If we read this through Plato, then the crowded human world becomes the cave, while the cavern of the film becomes the light – an inverted metaphor in which enlightenment is indistinguishable from terror. The lovers reach their highest “unity” only after enduring profound suffering, and this unity manifests as death and rebirth.
The Dead Mice
One of the film’s most haunting motifs involves the dead mice and the putrid stench of a decaying spouse. Here, subjective and objective horror work together in unsettling harmony.
Psychologists often argue that humans gravitate toward familiar emotional patterns rather than desirable ones. A person raised amid conflict and chaos may unconsciously seek partners who replicate that dynamic – not because it is pleasant but because it is familiar
In Together, love is not a chosen ideal but an ingrained habit. This explains why Tim (Dave Franco) can live beside a rotting mouse carcass without noticing the odor, and why the woman can sleep next to the decomposing body of her husband without recognizing his death. The horror is not in the corpse but in the habituation to it.
To Tim, the dead mouse no longer registers because he has normalized it; likewise, she has normalized the scent of her dead partner. Love here is not an objective pleasure but a subjective pattern, a repetition.
Love and Opposition
A common claim in popular psychology is that people are often drawn to opposites – those who embody traits they themselves lack. For instance, it is highly probable that a young man with a high sense of social responsibility would fall in love with a girl with an artistic and unattached spirit. Similarly, it is quite likely that she would be drawn to his maturity and self-restraint. Yet these relationships seldom endure; conflict erodes the initial fascination, and individuals eventually gravitate back toward similarity and stability.
However, in Plato’s view love is the striving for virtue and the avoidance of vice. For Plato, the lover and the beloved complete one another, and in a loving relationship both should strive to compensate for the other’s weaknesses and form a greater whole. Therefore, they do not need to be practically identical or perfectly aligned, but they must strive toward each other’s growth.
The couple in Together are not merely different but represent a reversal relative to social norms (the responsible man and the free-spirited woman). The man is artistic, introverted, unambitious by conventional standards; he cannot even drive, and is so passive in romance that the woman must propose to him. She is responsible, career-driven, socially adept, and unafraid of breaking tradition.
This satisfies Plato’s criterion of dissimilarity, but the film is not interested in their mutual elevation. Their relationship is fraught, mismatched, painful. The man continually withdraws; the woman endures a one-sided, exhausting love that threatens even her career.
No Platonic transformation occurs. Just as contemporary psychology asserts the relative stability of personality traits, the characters remain unchanged. Their conflict escalates until both die within their fused union, giving rise to a new being – one empty of any meaningful mission, or at least one the film refuses to define.
Furthermore, as we mentioned before, we encounter a subversion of masculine romantic archetypes. Breaking from the norm, the female character exhibits active social agency and financial responsibility, while the male adopts traditionally feminine roles – such as domesticity, cooking, and an inability to drive – traits more commonly attributed to women. Consequently, we witness a love born of contradiction in an inverted world, one that is far from ideal.
It is as if the filmmakers were determined to construct the entire narrative upon such dichotomies: a romantic relationship embedded within a horror story rather than a romance; the ‘househusband’ and the ‘career woman’ instead of the traditional reverse; the transposition of Plato’s cave into an urban setting where it serves as a model for salvation; and finally, the Platonic unity – typically described in philosophy as a moment of liberation and inner peace – is here transformed into the ultimate manifestation of horror.
Suicide and Platonic Drive
One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is its treatment of suicide as a means of preserving identity.
In one of the film’s final scenes, Tim encounters the fused mutilated body of the missing couple – Simon and Carrie – in the cave. At that moment, he pulls a knife from their neck and flees, while the grotesquely conjoined body pleads for help. Yet the sight is so horrifying that Tim cannot bring himself to stay.
Later, when Tim reunites with his partner Millie (Alison Brie), he decides to kill himself in order to preserve both his own identity and Millie’s. However, Millie has already lost a great deal of blood, and it seems that she may end up making this sacrifice in his place. In the end, though, Tim surrenders. Rather than allowing one of them to die so that the other might remain whole, he chooses life – life continued for both of them within a single body. He stops Millie’s bleeding, and ultimately the two of them merge.
Several details in this narrative are worth noting. First, the knife is removed from the neck of the miserable couple in the cave. Second, Simon and Carrie themselves live in the cave in a deeply wretched state. Third, both Tim and Millie – and even Jamie, who is the result of a same‑sex couple – appear capable of continuing their lives relatively normally within their new bodily form.
This raises an important question: Why, then, do Simon and Carrie live in such misery?
The answer likely lies in the knife. They seem to have attempted what Tim initially considers: suicide – or perhaps murder – in order to preserve themselves as separate individuals. Yet within the logic of the film, they are neither dead nor truly alive; instead, they appear condemned to a kind of perpetual suffering. What they failed to understand is that the unifying force of love is stronger even than death.
The movie thus suggests that rejecting union in the name of preserving individual identity may itself become a source of torment. At its deepest level, the story seems to pose a troubling question: Must one die in order to remain oneself?
In fact, the film seems intent on portraying Platonic love less as a philosophical outlook and more as a drive – one so powerful that not even death or individual will can resist it. Here, suicide functions as a symbol of will: a will that seeks to reclaim individual identity. Yet love, as a unifying force, overrides all such attempts. It is a love that is anything but pure, wholesome, or elevating.
Final Thoughts
Despite the philosophical possibilities drawn out here, Together ultimately serves its genre more than its metaphysics. Much of the meaning explored in this essay exists in the background, while the film foregrounds suspense and visceral shock. The filmmakers may have used these motifs to heighten emotion rather than to communicate explicit ideas. This raises a question every critic must confront: Does analysis enhance the viewer’s understanding, or does it lead us away from the emotional experience the film intends? The film wants us to feel fear, regardless of whether we grasp Plato or psychology. This essay shifts the focus toward meaning rather than sensation. That is both a strength and a limitation. Strength – because it opens a new interpretive doorway. Limitation – because it may distance the reader from the raw, frightening immediacy of the film.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
