Too Close For Casual

On 'Open Wide,' 'Together,' and the outer bounds of commitment

The following essay will contain spoilers for the 2025 novel Open Wide as well as the 2025 film Together.

Think about the first time you laid eyes on the love of your life—if you haven’t met them yet, just think of the last person you were really and truly obsessed with. How close did you want to get to them? Did you want them inside of you? Did you want to be inside of them? What if you could be—what if all of you could be?

These are the questions that haunt both Together, a 2025 body horror film starring real-life couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco as a dysfunctional millennial couple who move to an eerie house in the forest, as well as Open Wide, a 2025 body horror dark comedy novel that follows a young woman in New York City with dire intimacy issues.

In Together, Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco) have been in a relationship for a decade when Millie gets a job as a schoolteacher in the countryside, uprooting them from their exciting life in the city, where all their friends live and Tim has been clinging to the dream of being a musician. Their relationship has been on the rocks since Tim’s parents passed away, and when Millie proposes to Tim in front of their entire going-away party (a moment I still deem to be theeee most bone-chilling event of the whole film), he hesitates. That night, after he once again rebuffs her sexual advances, he has a nightmare about his dead parents, which gives us our first jump scare.

The couple moves to the country, and almost immediately things start going wrong. Tim finds a suspicious and gruesome rat king in a light fixture, and then during a stormy hike, the pair falls into a dark cave. They wait out the weather overnight, and upon waking, their legs are stuck together with a mysterious goo. They are able to separate this time, but it becomes increasingly clear that whatever happened in the cave is having profound effects on how they move through the world, initially just for Tim. When he’s out of Millie’s presence, he experiences what he perceives as panic attacks that border on withdrawal symptoms, going so far as to show up at her workplace to get his fix of her. To the film’s credit, it doesn’t take terribly long for Tim to connect what’s happening to him and Millie to their time in the cave—and, in turn, to another couple who have been missing for several days. It turns out the two are the latest pair to succumb to the dark magic of a supernatural cult, one that leans heavily on Greek mythology—specifically, the idea that human beings were once four-armed, four-legged beings who now walk the earth in the hopes of reuniting with their other halves. Millie and Tim fight their fate, which continues to draw them together as if by magnets and physically fuses their bodies together against their will, but eventually surrender and find themselves consumed by one another, bones breaking and organs shifting to make room in one combined body. In the end, it seems to be the thing that saves their floundering partnership.

(For the record, I genuinely really liked this movie and thought the pacing was excellent. At an hour and forty-two minutes, it wasted absolutely no time!)

I saw ads for this movie when it was making the rounds, but as a horror skeptic, it wasn’t until I read Jessica Gross’s Open Wide that I had any interest in watching it. The novel follows Olive, a maladjusted 30something woman living in Brooklyn who works as a radio host and carries a recorder with her everywhere so she can listen back to the sounds of the city, as well as almost all of her conversations. She’s had this habit since childhood, and she often uses her recordings in an attempt to improve her social skills, her lack of which has contributed to a fairly unlucky love life. At the start of the novel, she is volunteering at a food pantry—one of her many attempts at meeting a man—and she is rewarded with Theo, a fellow volunteer who also happens to be a handsome surgeon. The two get along immediately and embark on a romantic relationship, with Theo relaying the more morbid details of his job with almost unsettling fervor, and Olive furtively recording their conversations, as well as their sex life, without his permission. When she does eventually reveal her transgression, his initial shock and anger turn into acceptance.

But Olive doesn’t stop her boundary-crossing there. One night, she realizes that if she presses hard enough on the gap between Theo’s bottom front teeth, she can unzip his entire body and look inside. This revelation one night leads Olive to climb inside of Theo’s body and spend evenings there; it also triggers a memory of her mother possibly doing the same thing to her when she was a child and sharing her bed. Eventually she discloses what she’s been doing to Theo, and he is, of course, skeptical. When she shows him how it works and he realizes she’s telling the truth, he forbids her from entering him again until he does the same to her. The torment of being without her nightly odyssey is so great that, when she finally gets the opportunity to do it again, she climbs inside and stays there. We, as the reader, find out that Olive has been recounting her love story from inside her boyfriend’s guts.

I have written essays about marriage stories, as well as about relationship anxiety - including this one about Obsession, and this one about The Life Of A Showgirl and the social media boyfriendocalypse. Together and Open Wide both hold mirrors to our questions and anxieties about relationships, and their protagonists come to the same conclusion: to truly be in love is to consume one another. The Drama and Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen revealed our collective doubts about commitment. Those of us who pursue lifelong partnerships crave certainty. It’s easy to feel that we live in uniquely uncertain times, but every generation has faced threats and seismic shifts. It’s human nature to turn to our relationships as bulwarks against changing economic and social and existential tides. Both the book and the film take that desperation for certainty to extreme heights.

In Together, it is Tim who is initially most affected by the dark magic, but eventually Millie falls prey to it as well. While he is theorizing about what’s happening to them, she tries to walk away from the table, unwilling to hear him out, when suddenly she stops. He points out that the reason she can’t walk away is because he doesn’t want her to. Really, it’s not some shadowy third party source that is manipulating their movements; it’s their own desires. Millie is the conspicuously more invested party at the outset—we see him go slack in the shower, his body tossed to and fro with every turn that Millie makes in her car miles away—but after enough time under the spell, she too is a stranger in her own body, warped and changed by Tim’s unspoken needs. It begs the question: did Tim love and crave her all along, but just forgot how to show it? Did whatever bonded them together in that cave change his brain chemistry, triggering an affection for Millie to which he had previously lost access? It is a strength of the script that we don’t spend too long worrying about the mechanics of this altered state.

Similarly, in Open Wide, we are not subject to excessive exposition about how the mechanism of “climbing,” as Olive terms it, actually works. We are instead left with Olive’s feelings about climbing, and what she thinks it does for her relationship. She remarks towards the end that what she misses, while inside of Theo, is an inability to talk to him. But Olive views physical proximity to his insides as the ultimate in closeness, and is willing to sacrifice intimate conversation to avoid ever being without him again. It is therefore totally logical that Olive’s mother, who we are consistently reminded is domineering or even suffocating, would have done the same to her own daughter when she had the chance. In fact, the reason Olive is writing to the audience from inside Theo is because she was trying to avoid her mother’s impending visit, and to prevent her mother from climbing inside Theo herself. Olive uses her relationship with Theo as a respite from her overly enmeshed relationship with her mother, literally escaping into him as a means of cutting maternal ties. It is tragic that the only way Olive can imagine carving out a separate identity from her mother is to fully immerse herself into Theo. Then again, even in the less mystical world we inhabit, it’s not so rare to encounter people who throw themselves into their romantic relationships as a way to define themselves in direct opposition to the way they grew up.

Similarly, the only way Tim and Millie can imagine a path out of their fusing-limb purgatory is to fully surrender to the transformation. Tim initially attempts to kill himself to save Millie from their fate, but eventually they embrace and ride it out. The thought of living without each other was too painful to bear, so they decided to live without themselves. Was it a noble sacrifice? Or was it cowardice? Is the dissolution of selfhood a cautionary tale of romantic obsession, or is it the natural endpoint of committing oneself to another? Is there a way to frame it as a kind of nirvana? A kind of freedom?

Olive’s habit of recording the world around her is, at its core, a bid for closeness with the rest of humanity. She wants to understand how conversations work so she can be better at them. She wants to be socially fluid, desirable, loved. And when she finally gets her hands on love, she abandons herself in order to keep it. It can be extremely tempting to cede control of your life to another, to the great and terrible force of romantic love. It is a kind of sedative, a kind of narcotic annihilation, to stop trying so hard at becoming yourself and instead allow yourself to become an extension of someone else. It is, of course, also a great loss. But who among us has not, at least temporarily, abdicated our post as a self-actualized person in order to pursue the dream of oneness?

In both stories, love ultimately makes someone disappear so that a new entity can emerge. Interestingly, though, in Open Wide, Theo still gets to steer the ship. He contains the woman he loves, becoming the sole vessel through which she has access to the world. Perhaps it is a source of great pleasure to him. Perhaps it causes him great pain. We don’t know, because Olive is incapable of telling us how he really feels, even from deep inside him. And even Olive does not know the full extent of what she has forsaken. Inside Theo, she has no responsibilities, no failures, no indignities of modern life. And maybe she felt she had no other option, but lest we forget: she chose her fate.