Dave Franco and Alison Brie on Their Gory Romcom ‘Together’ at Sundance

Together, the body horror movie starring real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco, has landed at Neon, which has had success as of late with horror films like Longlegs.

Michael Shanks wrote and directed the movie about a long-term couple who, while their relationship is in a weak moment, decides to move to the countryside, which triggers a supernatural incident. The movie was greeted at the Sundance Film Festival with a raucous premiere screening filled with applause, laughs and screams of discomfort.

The Hollywood Reporter review of the movie reads, “Shanks never lets the relationship drama intrude too much on the demented ‘pleasures’ of the stretchy flesh, mining humor throughout from such things as social media banality, gay weddings, the uses of muscle relaxants against occult forces and, of course, that electric saw. It’s refreshing to see a horror movie that relies less on shock tactics than good old-fashioned dread and revulsion.”

In addition to starring, Brie and Franco produced the film. Picturestart, Tango, 1.21 and Princess Pictures also produced.

The dealmaking out of the 2025 festival has been slow, with Together being the first major sale. Other potential suitors include Searchlight, Sony and A24. One source places the price tag at $17 million.

WME repped the filmmakers.

The movie’s release date is set for August 1, 2025!

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Instantly the buzziest Midnight entry at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival after a raucous, packed premiere at the Eccles, “Together” puts real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco through the emotional and physical wringer. Written and directed by Michael Shanks as a body-horror satire of his own relationship to relationships — specifically a long-term one with his own partner — the skin-crawling, not-for-the-squeamish indie tars Brie and Franco as spouses who give a whole new, grotesque meaning to the idea of codependency.

In the film, Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) relocate from the city to the countryside after she takes a new job teaching at an elementary school. Once there, a mysterious cave in the woods reveals a supernatural water source that draws them closer together — and in Lovecraftian body-horror terms.

Shanks, Brie, and Franco joined the IndieWire Studio presented by Dropbox at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival to talk about their new film — starting with whether or not the buzzed-about horror title (which features plenty of sex, contorted limbs, and crawling skin) tested Brie and Franco’s actual marriage.

“I think we thought it might [test our relationship] more than it did,” Brie said. “We went into knowing that because of the intimate nature of the film and how much time we’d be spending together, even though we’ve worked together before, Dave likes to say we would come out of it either getting divorced or becoming more codependent than ever.”

“It was the latter,” said Franco, who previously directed Brie in the horror movie “The Rental” and the 2023 romance “Somebody I Used to Know.” “This was like the most full-on thing we’ve ever done together. We’re very picky about what we choose to do, especially when we’re onscreen together, just because we don’t want to burn people out on us.”

“Or have it be distracting,” Brie said. “The fact that we’re a real-life couple fuels the viewer’s experience watching it.”

Franco pointed out that the production, which shot in Melbourne despite being set in New York state, had just 21 days. “Every single day, there was either a heavy prosthetic or really intense stunt sequences. We had to go in knowing that we were probably going to only get one or two takes per setup,” Franco said.

Did the actors struggle to separate their personal and professional lives, going to a set and going home together? “No. Luckily our relationship is much healthier than the couple in the movies, so it wasn’t difficult to leave their relationship on set,” Brie said.

Franco added, “When we’re on location for this movie, we really do live and breathe it, and we’re OK with the movie being our life. But when we’re home and writing something together, we need to put boundaries so we’re not only talking about work.”

“And when he says ‘we’ need to put up boundaries, he means ‘I’ need to put up boundaries because David would just keep writing any second of the day, brushing our teeth, about to fall asleep.”

Source: IndieWire

Alison Brie and Dave Franco are together in more ways than one.

The couple, married since 2017, costar and co-produce the new thriller Together, from writer-director Michael Shanks in his directorial debut. Brie, 42, and Franco, 39, debuted the film at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, Jan. 26.

Speaking at PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly’s Shutterstock Official Sundance Film Festival Portrait Studio, Brie and Franco joke that playing isolated couple Millie and Tim had real-world implications for their relationship. “I think we’re more codependent than ever,” quips Franco.

“Yeah,” agrees Brie with a laugh. “The film is about a codependent couple who’s sort of in a bit of a rut. They’re feeling dangerously codependent, having issues with that. And I think we went into it being like, ‘Our relationship is much healthier and everything’s good.’ And then we came out on the other side a little more codependent.”

“But because one of us will go off for a few months at a time [to film], we’re kind of forced to be independent, which balances everything out,” shares Franco.

“We like to have one person home with the cats, if possible,” he adds. “The loves of our lives.”

Together marks the duo’s first onscreen return since costarring in 2017’s The Little Hours and The Disaster Artist; Franco also directed his wife in 2023’s Somebody I Used to Know. “With a move to the countryside already testing the limits of a couple’s relationship, a supernatural encounter begins an extreme transformation of their love, their lives, and their flesh,” per a synopsis from Sundance.

“We want to be heavily involved in the creative process of the films that we’re making,” says Brie. “It’s nice also to be able to see something through to the end. As actors, you come in to shoot it and then you don’t see the film again until it’s finished. As producers, we get to be involved in the post-production process and editing and notes, and really, we get granular. We love it.”

Source: People

Stars of “Together,” Alison Brie and Dave Franco, talk about sharing clothes, working together, farts and what all couples need to do to be successful while answering our very important questions at ​​the L.A. Times Studios @ Sundance Film Festival presented by Chase Sapphire Reserve.

Dave Franco and Alison Brie talk collaborating together in the horror genre “Together”

Dave Franco and Alison Brie brought their new horror film “Together” to Sundance over the weekend, and sitting in TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt, the married creatives revealed how they balanced their real-life relationship with crafting an unsettling genre piece about co-dependency.

“The movie is about a co-dependent couple who have been together for over a decade,” Brie told TheWrap editor-in-chief and CEO Sharon Waxman. “They are in a little bit of a rut, and they move to the countryside, sort of away from their friends and community, and some weird things happen to them.”

While the film sounds like a relationship drama on the surface, Franco emphasized its horror elements: “This sounds like a relationship drama, and it is, but it’s also a full-on horror movie. The set pieces are like nothing you’ve seen in a horror movie. It’s very leaning into body horror.”

The couple, who have been married for eight years, served as producers on the project. Brie highlighted their collaborative approach: “We were very close with our writer-director Michael Shanks, so it was a true collaboration between the three of us. When I think about the shoot, it was so fun. Any time one of us was not on camera, we were behind the monitor with Shanks.”

Franco and Brie’s real-life marriage helped rather than hindered their portrayal of a troubled couple. “It’s only great,” Franco said, addressing potential concerns about playing an unhealthy relationship while being married in real life. “The confusing part was that in the movie, the couple that we play is going through a lot of hardships and [are] not in a great relationship.”

The film marks another collaboration between Brie and Franco, who previously worked together on 2023’s “Somebody I Used to Know” and 2020’s “The Rental.”

“Together” may not be their last venture into horror, either, as Franco revealed, “We currently have the seeds of an idea for another horror movie that we might write together.”

Source: The Wrap