Aristophanes was Right and that's the Horror—Together (2025)

We all might have heard this ancient Greek myth that humans were once whole. We had four legs, four arms, and two faces. We were so powerful that we dared to challenge the gods. And as punishment, Zeus split us into two halves, condemning us to wander the earth forever in search of our other half (our soulmate).

This idea appears in Symposium by Plato. (Just so y’all know, this wasn’t Plato’s own claim, but a story told by the playwright Aristophanes. It is his myth that popularized the idea of soulmates as “two halves of one whole.”)

Through this, one can understand that love, in its oldest telling, begins with a wound. And this movie clearly captures this idea. 

Let’s begin with Tim’s character first. Tim is a character who carries his past with him which refuses to stay dead. As a child, he witnesses something no child should ever see—his mother’s emotional rupture. He watches her sit bedside his dead father, smiling, looking directly at him. This moment is deeply disturbing not just because of death, but because of what it represents. It clearly blurs the boundary between love and madness. That’s why love, in Tim’s earliest memory, does not let go even when it should. He sees his father’s rotting corpse and the smell of it leads as a triggering factor to the trauma he develops. 

Now, why am I emphasizing more on the word smell? 

The reason is because smell is the oldest sense (remember your neuroscience class??).

Olfaction is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and sends information directly to the amygdala which is related to fear and emotion, and hippocampus which is related to memory. This is a particular reason why smells are uniquely powerful in triggering emotional memories more than other senses. And this is what exactly happens to Tim. 

The smell keeps his trauma alive, not as a memory of the past but as something continually relived in the present. His body remembers what his mind desperately tries to forget. This is why his nightmares persist and healing never happens completely. 

Time passes but trauma does not. 

The image of his mother—a living woman, sitting beside a decomposing corpse, smiling—it all leads to the idea of what the child imprints in his mind. From this moment, Tim unconsciously learns something dangerous about love. That love is something that stays even in decay, that separation is unnatural and letting go is impossible. This memory silently shapes his adult relationships. 

Tim’s adult relationship mirrors his childhood trauma. He is unable to fully commit to his partner (Millie) because love for him itself is tied to fear. Tim and Millie are of course not in a healthy relationship and the movie never pretends that they are. Their bond is not built on mutual growth but on mutual dependence. They cling to each other because being apart feels unbearable. What we see unfolding is a form of codependency taken to its extreme. 

If you pay close attention to their dialogues, you can see how effectively this codependency is portrayed. Especially during their conversation with Jamie (the neighbour who later turns out to be the cult leader). Their frustration leaks through the way they talk about each other, revealing emotional exhaustion rather than intimacy.

Now it’s time for Millie’s character. Well, unlike Tim, Millie’s trauma is not rooted in a single haunting image or sensory memory (the movie doesn’t explicitly talk about Millie’s ‘trauma’ but viewing it as a student of psychology, I picked up little cues that helped me understand her character). So, Millie is not haunted by the past in the way Tim is; she is haunted by the possibility of being left behind. Where Tim fears attachment because of what it might turn into, Millie fears distance because of what it might take away.

Millie’s need for closeness is not simply love but a kind of reassurance. She experiences separation as a threat. She is someone who does not want to be alone with herself. Her identity feels incomplete without the relationship. This is why her responses often appear excessive, emotionally charged, or at times desperate. 

Tim fears being consumed by love. Millie fears disappearing without it.

This is where codependency comes into picture. Codependency involves blurred boundaries, loss of identity, and emotional survival being outsourced to another person. In this movie, this psychological dynamic is externalized through supernatural and body-horror elements. 

And this brings us back to Aristophanes. 

Plato’s Symposium imagined becoming “one” again as the ultimate fulfilment of love. But this movie makes you question what it means to love someone. It makes you question, what if becoming ‘one’ comes at the cost of individuality, desire, and choice?

In healthy relationships, we see our partners grow and thrive without losing our own identity. Loving someone does not mean forgetting who you are, it means growing alongside them. It means recognizing your flaws, accepting them, and making an effort to change; not for the sake of the relationship alone, but for yourself. It means being aware of how you feel in the presence of them. 

Being in a relationship can be exhausting at times. You cannot know what the other person thinks or feels all the time. And that’s completely okay. We are human. You don’t need a checklist to prove compatibility, but you do need boundaries. You need to remember that you exist as an individual outside the relationship. 

Love that requires the erasure of self is not intimacy, it is extinction. 

Millie’s devotion appears romantic on the surface but beneath it lies a profound fear of existing alone. 

In the final moments of the movie, we see Tim and Millie embrace their fate as they merge together, becoming “one.” 

I personally love endings like this where they leave the viewer to decide whether what they are witnessing is a happy ending or a horrifying one.

By the end, it becomes clear that they choose to be together because they have accepted their fate. The physical merging of their bodies is merely a continuation of what had already happened emotionally. By the time they become “one,” they had long stopped existing as two separate selves. Through this their suffering ends, their conflict ends, their separation ends, which can be viewed as a happy ending. But as their suffering ends, so does their selfhood, their individuality, their whole identity, and their freedom. 

In the last scene, we can see an androgynous person which is the product of their merge, named Tilly. Tilly is almost unrecognizable, a reminder that Tim and Millie chose to be together not because they love each other in a healthy way, but because separation was unbearable for them. They chose to collapse over walking away. 

Perhaps that is the movie’s most unsettling claim. That love, when driven by unresolved trauma and fear of loss, does not save us—it consumes us.