Played at its climax, the Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” takes on a new macabre meaning in writer-director Michael Shanks’ Together. In the ickily effective body-horror movie, married-in-real-life actors Dave Franco and Alison Brie play a couple on the rocks who will essentially be cursed, over the course of the film, to be more than just attached at the hip. When we first meet them, Millie and Tim are approaching their first full decade as a pair. Whereas the actors playing them are ostensibly going strong, Millie and Tim seem like they’d be better off apart. Both 35, Millie is years into a teaching career, while the musically inclined, often unemployed Tim still white-knuckles more-than-probably doomed dreams of an indie-rock breakthrough. They almost never have sex, either, partly owing to Tim’s family trauma-informed performance anxiety, and when Millie surprises him with a marriage proposal during a gathering with friends, he hesitates for so long that when his whimpered-out yes finally arrives, the room remains excruciatingly silent with secondhand embarrassment, save for one guest’s decidedly unhelpful pity applause.

But rather than break up, the duo has decided to respark their relationship — as many long-cuffed, smiling-through-their-misery couples might — with a major life change: buying a house in a small town a few hours from the city. Millie gets a job at an elementary school in a dramatically smaller institution than the one she’s leaving behind. The unable-to-drive Tim loosely agrees to commute by train ride as needed for music-related opportunities. Among its most evocative stretches, Together’s denial-seeped opening act would incur dread whether or not the film included its eerily foreshadowing prologue, and not for reasons having anything to do with the supernatural.

Read the full review at South Sound.

Photo credit: Ben King/Neon