Reviewed: “Together” and “High Rollers”

‘Together’ (2025)

In this claustrophobic, psycho-horror thriller written and directed by first-timer Michael Shanks, there’s much to impress – but it doesn’t, at least to the degree it should, through familiarity; once into it, “Together” plays like an homage to Ari Aster’s art-house horror hits “Heredity” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019) with a few pages lifted from Brandon Cronenberg’s growing catalog of body-horror and Coralie Fargeat’s gloriously grim “The Substance” (2024). “Together” is conceptually and ideologically about codependence the way “Get Out” (2017) was about racism. We embed with real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie – who together starred in the 2020 Vrbo-from-hell thriller “The Rental” – as Tim and Millie, who move to a remote area for Millie’s new job as a schoolteacher. Tim, a slacker man-boy with only part-time gigs as a guitarist, tags sheepishly along. We know the couple’s got issues, as Millie tells a friend at their going-away party that Tim doesn’t like to “do it” anymore, and when she proposes to him at party, on bent knee with a mimed ring in a jewelry box, he balks. In the quiets near their new woodsy abode, they go for a hike and end up slipping through a sinkhole into a cave with a well seemingly designed by crew from the “Alien” films. “Don’t drink the water,” you shout silently at the screen. But they do, and when they pass out, waiting for the light of day to find a way out, they wake up, joined at the hips – kinda. Some rending, a little bit of pain and a few small tear wounds solve it. Tim writes it off as mildew, but later, back home at night and in bed, Millie’s hair starts to grow down Tim’s throat; when Tim finally gets up his nerve with Millie, he can’t pull out postcoitus. The sticky situations mount, while Millie’s passive-aggressive colleague just down the lane seems to be holding out on critical information. The performances by Brie and Franco, as a capable woman angling for adulthood and cuck in need of a clue, forge seamless onscreen chemistry. What doesn’t quite work is a third act in which revelations fall literally out of the closet with clunky awkwardness. Not worth a long-term commitment.

‘High Rollers’

Is Hulu following Netflix’s footsteps by stuffing its catalog with bad thrillers featuring A-list actors for the clicks? John Travolta stars in this slight casino caper copying “Oceans Eleven” more in the cinematic-mediocrity mode of “Battlefield Earth” (2000) than anything he’s done with Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) or Elmore Leonard (“Get Shorty”). He plays Mason Goddard, leader of a high-tech group of thieves – cool, but not as cool as Danny Ocean, and his team of diversely skilled operatives lacks the quirky, hip and fun nature of Ocean’s crew. Early on, Mason’s no-nonsense significant other (Gina Gershon) is taken hostage in a commando raid orchestrated by an international crime lord (Danny Pardo), who demands that Mason execute a job for him: Raid the vaults of the high-security casino that his brother (Demián Castro) runs, and Mason’s betrothed will be returned. Travolta, Gershon and especially Castro and Pardo relish and deliver their two-dimensional roles with conviction, which adds a sense of credibility to the scenes they’re in. But there’s uninspired, sloppy plotting and a flaccid script, which is exacerbated by woefully inept direction (and editing) by Randall Emmett, whose credits include the equally dull “Midnight in the Switchgrass” (2021). The smooth, cool caper this could have been is instead a garbled criminal offense.