Polygon.com / 30.07.25

Together fixes horror movies' worst cliché in a supremely creepy way

Back in the mid-1980s, the nighttime soap opera Dallas set the all-time gold standard for terrible uses of the It was all a dream! plot reveal, with a ridiculous twist erasing the entire previous season. In the decades that followed, Hollywood has continued to exploit this overused trope. Horror movies, in particular, going back to the beginning of cinema and including genre classics like Carrie and Friday the 13th, have leaned on dream fakeouts to inject extra shocks and scares only to immediately roll them back. Its almost always a letdown when something terrifying happens to a horror-movie character, and then they wake up with a start, both because its a cheap trick, and because its such a lazy, overused one. Enter Together, the feature debut of Australian writer-director Michael Shanks. The film, which opens in American theaters on July 30, is a supremely creepy body horror starring real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a thirtysomething couple initially struggling for i...
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