Body horror is having a moment. Not that it ever went away. It’s been with us, in an official gross-out capacity, ever since the term was coined around the films of David Cronenberg, who invented body horror as we know it — squishy, fleshy, and, in a weird way, brainy.
Cronenberg has always been a filmmaker of ideas; the ickier his images of body mutation get, the surer you can be that they’re all a heady metaphor. In recent years, other directors, like Luca Guadagnino (“Suspiria”) and Julia Ducournau (“Titane”), have taken up the body-horror mantle, and I think we saw a body-horror apotheosis with “The Substance,” in which the cathartic climax — the heroine exploding into a monster mass of festering flesh — felt like the ultimate metaphor for what happens when you mess with the flesh that God gave you. “ Together ” is a Sundance movie that premiered under the festival’s Midnight banner, which means that it’s basically allowed to be the opposite of everything most Sundance movies are.
It’s the rare film-festival horror film that could wind up playing in megaplexes, the way “The Substance” did. Not that it’s nearly as good; this is more of an unhinged roller-coaster acid-trip if-it-looks-weird-do-it freak-out of a movie. Yet it’s fun (in a rather bumptious way), it stars two very good actors ( Dave Franco and Alison Brie , who are a real-life couple) playing a couple who have as many issues as couples do in real life, and it works as a t.
