This article contains spoilers for Together.
Dave Franco and Alison Brie have been married for a decade, but they’ve never been closer than they are in the final scene of their new body-horror film, Together.
The duo stars as Tim and Millie, a longtime couple who are in the middle of working out some relationship issues when they move to a new town where Millie has landed a teaching job. Out for a hike one day, they’re caught off guard by a fast-moving storm and fall into a mysterious cave, where they’re forced to spend the night. The experience brings them closer — literally. When they wake up in the morning, their bodies have started to stick together.
As the film goes on, they become increasingly unable to separate, and when they come into contact, their bodies form connective tissue, seemingly absorbing into one another. Try as they might to fight it (including using an electric saw), they eventually give in to the supernatural force pulling them together like magnets. They undress, embrace, and slow dance to Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” as their bodies merge.
In the final scene, Millie’s parents arrive for a visit. When the door opens to their home, a single merged figure that looks like a combination of their bodies answers and invites them inside.
“We call them Tilly,” Franco tells Entertainment Weekly.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Alison Brie and Dave Franco in ‘Together’
“The base of Tilly is me,” Brie notes. “That’s me standing there in Dave’s clothes with shoulder pads and Dave’s eyebrows and a wig. I feel like we had a lot of fun on that day, taking a lot of photos.
“And then we CGI’d my nose onto her, my jaw,” Franco adds, as Brie continues, “His Adam’s apple, his eyes.”
The Mad Men star says the “trickiest” part of creating Tilly was getting their voice right. “In the test phase, it was interesting because we hadn’t done the sound mix yet during our test screening,” Brie recalls. “So [Tilly] had my voice, and you realize how much audio affects people. The majority of the face was Dave’s, but because my voice was coming through, I was sitting in the back of one of the test screenings, and the audience did not know that I was there to listen in on the feedback. The moderator said, ‘What did you think of this person?’ And one woman shot her hand up and said, ‘I mean, it just looks like Alison Brie.'”
She adds with a laugh, “I turned to producers and I was like, ‘That’s the meanest thing that’s ever been said about me.’ I was like, ‘Can we enhance the Adam’s apple? Can we widen the jaw a bit?’ Once we pitched the voice differently and incorporated Dave’s voice, I think it worked out better.”
“Do we wish Tilly was slightly more attractive?” Franco jokes. “Sure, we do.”
Tilly’s physical appearance aside, what’s going on in her head? Do Tim and Millie’s consciousnesses both share real estate in their brain?
“Maybe this is why, to me, the ending of the film is optimistic, and I think every member of the audience will take something different away from this movie, depending on how they feel about relationships and monogamy,” Brie prefaces. “To me, this is the most at peace we have ever seen these characters in the film.”
NEON
Alison Brie and Dave Franco in the magical cave in ‘Together’
Earlier in the film, it’s revealed that a church once formed around the site of this magical cave, where parishioners worshipped its supernatural powers. While it’s unclear what became of this church, we do meet one of its surviving members: Tim and Millie’s next-door neighbor, and Millie’s empathetic coworker, Jamie (Damon Herriman). When Jamie finally reveals to Millie that he is a combination of himself and his lover, he gives her a hard pitch on the benefits of combined living.
“I do believe the stuff that Damon Harriman’s character is saying in the very creepy scene where he’s pursuing me, it actually is an interesting sell,” Brie says. “You share all the same memories, you’re sharing your thoughts, they’re all coexisting at the same time in harmony. Something kind of beautiful about that.”
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She adds, “I don’t know how they’re gonna explain it to Tilly’s parents over brunch. It’s a conversation for another time.”
“All that being said,” Franco playfully interjects, “we have also talked to people we know who are single who watch this film and say, ‘I am so happy I’m single.’ So again, everyone will say something different about the ending.”
Together is now in theaters.
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