Together

 

One could understate the central premise of Aussie writer/ director / visual effects artist Michael Shanks' debut feature film Together as the story of a young-ish couple with commitment issues.

Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) have been dating for a decade with little forward momentum. Some of this is attributed to Tim's horrifying discovery of his whacked-out mother in bed with his long dead father's putrefying corpse.

Millie, who barely contains her frustration with her "boy partner," decides to take a job as a teacher in a remote elementary school. (It's not clear if we're in Shanks' native Australia or some other locale.) Tim, a musician with limited prospects, agrees to come along. To Franco's credit, Tim's diffidence is palpable to the audience. That and Millie's sharply pointed barbs make these static millennials as annoying as their real-world counterparts.

But both Millie and Tim grow out of their initial pitiable self-involvement as they begin to experience unusual attraction to one another, after falling into a subterranean cavern that contains vestiges of a cult that practiced weird bonding ceremonies, according to Millie's oily school principal (David Herriman).

Franco and Brie give their all to Shanks' evolving grotesqueries, flinging about and contorting themselves as the ties that bind grow tighter and Millie and Tim get over their nagging, bloody commitment issues.