(L-R) Alison Brie, Michael Shanks and Dave Franco attend the "Together" Premiere during the 2025 Sundance Film Festival at Eccles Center Theatre on January 26, 2025 in Park City, Utah. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text Together writer-director Michael Shanks has been riding high since his supernatural body-horror film debuted at Sundance 2025 to universal acclaim. The overwhelmingly positive response has mostly maintained itself now that the Dave Franco-Alison Brie two-hander is in theaters. (It currently boasts a 98 percent score among critics on Rotten Tomatoes.) The warm embrace of Shanks' feature directorial debut has been so impactful that the New Zealand and Australia-raised YouTuber-turned-filmmaker has already started worrying about the comedown in humorous fashion. Related Stories Movies Alison Brie and Dave Franco Tease 'Together' Proposal Contest: "How Crazy Romantic Is This?" TV Seth Rogen on "Specifically" Writing Dave Franco's Role in 'The Studio' for the Actor "I'm worried there's going to be a potential bit of whiplash or a hangover from this year that feels like a beautiful dream," Shanks tells The Hollywood Reporter. "This chapter is going to close, and I'm going to go back to living in West Footscray [Australia] where I'll think of it as some weird anecdote: 'Hey, remember those few weeks where people liked what I was doing?'" The film begins with Tim (Franco) and Mille's (Brie) move to the countryside, and unlike the married actors who play them, the couple has been unable to turn their relationship into a proper marriage, largely due to Tim's floundering music career and unresolved familial trauma. While exploring the trails around their new home, Tim and Millie fall into a relatively shallow cave where they're forced to stay the night. In the process, Tim drinks some cave water that results in the couple sticking together in ways that become more and more grotesque as the film goes along. Around the halfway point, the gravitational pull between the recently sexless couple becomes so intense that they have to seize the moment and fornicate in Millie's workplace bathroom. However, the duo's bodies inevitably become overly attached to each other. The idea for this intimate scene came from Shanks' long-term partner, Louie McNamara, and knowing that there's a recurring online discourse around the necessity of sex scenes in mainstream movies, Shanks remains keenly aware of how essential the scene is to his narrative. "Our film is trying to paint a holistic view of the romantic relationship experience, and its absence would be notable, particularly with a premise like this that is all about the body and physical closeness," Shanks says. "It's certainly not a scene for titillation. It's a scene of tension and cringe." At the last minute, Shanks wanted to up the body-horror ante in the scene by including a shot of Tim and Millie's genitals clung together despite the characters' best efforts to release themselves. The finishing touch to the scene that McNamara originated would again be provided by her and her employer at the time. "It just so happened that my partner was working for a sex toy company at the time," Shanks recalls. "So she had access to extremely realistic genitalia, and I was like, 'We can get that for free? Great! Give it to the prosthetics guy.' He then added a couple of bits and bobs of pubic hair to the free prosthetic." The aforementioned example of intimacy is one of many reasons why Shanks believes that he couldn't have made his film without a real-life couple. As shown in the marketing, Tim and Millie's arms eventually become merged, and the mutual prosthetic required Franco and Brie to be conjoined for hours upon hours, so much so that they had to take bathroom breaks together. When you add that practical reality to the breakneck pace of a 21-day shoot, it certainly helped to have two actors who already had that degree of familiarity with one another. "We were demanding that [the actors] go to places of extreme emotional intimacy, as well as physical intimacy, and without a married couple, I don't think we could have pulled this off," Shanks admits. Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Shanks also discusses some of the semi-autobiographical details in Together, before addressing his shared Australian history with the Philippou brothers (Talk to Me, Bring Her Back). *** I kept thinking about Jerry Maguire's "you complete me" line while watching Together, and the film really does explore that relationship idea quite literally. This was all born out of the collective identity that you and your long-term partner had formed? Yeah, my partner Louie [McNamara] and I are approaching our 17th anniversary. We met just after high school, and when I was writin