Relationships can be sticky, or so couple Tim and Millie discover with shock and horror. Built on the simple premise of “what if stuck and keep smushing?”, Michael Shanks’ directorial debut Together stars mostly-comedic actors and real-life partners Dave Franco and Alison Brie in a film that gleefully puts them through the ringer. Coming a year after Coralie Fargeat’s instant classic body-horror extravaganza The Substance, shredded-skin, crushed bones, and gallons of blood hasn’t been this popular since James Wan and Leigh Whannel’s Saw, though nowadays, it seems as though the genre is finally getting more respect, being recognized for the artistic values of its makeup effects team and go-for-broke performances of its victimized casts than being simply dismissed as “torture porn”. What Together achieves is a solid sense of humor and fun combined with incredibly impressive effects work, though it still feels the unfortunate need to offer us more in terms of plot that doesn’t always feel necessary.

Tim and Millie (previously mentioned Dave Franco and Alison Brie) are a struggling couple who move out to a home in the middle of the country for Millie’s job as an elementary school teacher. Tim is a down-on-his-luck musician, entering his mid-30s and still lacking success. Both find themselves at a crossroads in their lives and relationship, though both still hanging on, even after a botched engagement proposal initiated by Millie. After a hike in their neighboring woods, they find themselves trapped in a below-ground cavern, where they are forced to spend the night. There, a thirsty Tim finds a pool, where the water is seemingly clear, and drinks from it. That night, his body undergoes a dramatic change: it wants to feed off of Millie. Over the course of time, no matter how hard they try to stay separate, like two hyper-magnets, their bodies want to combine, and combine until they become one.

If the plot left its explanations at that base level, we would have the room to just focus on great and inventive ways to force these two beautiful people together, letting their limbs bust, melt, and break or their lips and foreheads fuse and forcibly split. Of course it is burdened with a budget too small to get 100 minutes of just-practical effects insanity, but the potential is right there. Instead, the film uses its first half to built a plot full of lore, chaotic dream sequences, traumatic backstories that go nowhere, all feeling forced into what is on very basic but effective terms, a very simple idea. A great simple idea. An idea that thrives on simplicity. Adding in all that it feels it needs to explain causes a restlessness to its pace and a frustrating lack of cohesion, as we try to understand our characters and what drove them down the path in their partnership that led them to this nightmare scenario. But by the end of it all, many of those threads never reach a satisfying thematic resonance or narrative importance. It merely comes off as filler just to pad out the runtime and explaining the source of their curse removes the fun sense of mystery. No amount of enjoyment changes if you get the backstory or you don’t. The one-idea premise sells itself.

Thankfully, it does manage to mostly get by in understanding the complexities of a fractured relationship, focused on the themes of codependency and healthy communication. It does feel like a lot of Franco and Brie’s personal experiences were woven into the building of their characters, and if not, both actors have a very nuanced and layered idea of who Tim and Millie are as a couple to keep us invested in them as our leads. While both naturally sell their more comedic touches than their dramatic, it’s impossible to not have an enjoyable time watching them suffer.

When the film does finally get to sink its teeth into its genre, it’s easy to be won over by its creative use of pain that we often begin to phantom-feel under our skin. It’s all apart of the fun if you enjoy knuckle-squeezing, eye-wincing, legs-buckling type of on-screen torture. When the film remembers to relax and have a great, gory time, it’s wonderful. Only when it takes itself too seriously, getting lost in its own bloody sauce, does it begin to lose its grasp. Shanks directs everything incredibly well though, finding fun and frequent jolts, capturing an unsettling mood, and framing the camera perfectly on the most tender body part. To have known nothing about this film going in would have probably been a delight, as it was for Sundance audiences earlier this year, but as a film that has now revealed enough of the cards up its sleeve in its amusing marketing, it may be a little patience-testing to get to the fun stuff. When it’s fun, though, it’s a bloody good time.