📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Mending Bodies.

▞ Hon Lai Chu (author), Jacqueline Leung (translator), Mending Bodies, Two Lines Press, 2025. 240 pgs.
▞ Michael Shanks (director), Together, 2025. 102 min.

The compulsion to find one’s “other half” is a romantic platitude so deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche that its troubling implication, that being alone equates to incompleteness, rarely invites scrutiny. It is an expression that inherently pathologises individuality, framing solitary existence as a state of lack and unhappiness. Moreover, it slyly displaces the individual’s existential questioning with a false promise of wholeness, assuming that identity can be attained through finding a “missing piece.” Hong Kong writer Hon Lai-chu’s novel Mending Bodies (first published in Chinese in 2010, with an English translation by Jacqueline Leung released in 2025) and Australian director Michael Shanks’s 2025 feature debut Together both seize upon this unsettling premise, deploying body horror to literalise the notion of the “other half” and to interrogate the consequences of enforced completeness. Whether in Hon’s political allegory of a dystopian society governed by the Conjoinment Act or in Shanks’s supernatural horror, in which a couple become accidentally entangled with a cult devoted to body fusion in relationships, drawing its power from a gruesome underground pond, both works mount a sharp critique of the ideological underpinnings of modern relationships, exploring the complex and often irreconcilable interplay between personal identity, autonomy, and codependency. The striking parallel in their treatment of the central metaphor, namely the literal joining and fusing of bodies, exposes the problematic erosion of selfhood that the romantic ideal of the “other half” seeks to conceal beneath an illusion of fulfilment.

Hon Lai-chu’s novel is marked by a sceptical tone and a pervasive sense of alienation as it immerses the reader in the reality of an unnamed fictional city, allegedly modelled on Hong Kong, following the passage of the Conjoinment Act, a controversial law mandating individuals to undergo surgical conjoining to combat economic stagnation, environmental degradation, and pervasive loneliness. This policy’s subtle coercion is embodied by those surrounding the protagonist, a young university student who has reached the eligible age for conjoinment while simultaneously confronting the urgency of completing her thesis on the cultural history of conjoined beings. Each figure applies a distinct form of social pressure. A state-sanctioned psychologist provides ideological justification, asserting, “No person is complete on their own… Only by being with another person can we experience the cycles of joy, heartbreak, harmony, and conflict necessary to arrive at true fulfilment.” This appeal to scientific and emotional authority reframes a bizarre policy as a path to psychological wholeness and wellbeing, creating a persuasive rhetoric that legitimises state intervention under the veneer of medical credibility. More personal, yet equally compelling, pressures arise from the narrator’s immediate circle. Her mother, having witnessed the physical disadvantages of conjoined couples and cynically remarking that even successful patients “slowly wilt, like flowers in a vase,” nonetheless feels palpable relief when her daughter contemplates the surgery.

The most disquieting manifestation of societal coercion, however, lies in the transformation of the protagonist’s roommate, May. Her change from an intellectual confidante into a pragmatic conformist who not only attempts to persuade the protagonist but is suspected of orchestrating her introduction to Lok, the candidate assessed as a suitable partner for conjoinment under the pretext of recommending a sleep therapist, reveals how ideological systems secure compliance by converting personal bonds into channels for the transmission of their values. This betrayal becomes a source of anguish when the protagonist learns the therapist’s identity, a moment of shocking disorientation she describes as follows: “I imagined these people towering above me, watching me as I crashed into wall after wall of my own maze, and felt the beat of my bewildered heart turn quick and erratic.” This metaphor encapsulates the protagonist’s entrapment, as she realises that the very people closest to her have become agents of the institutional forces she regards with both desperation and suspicion.

In Shanks’s Together, the protagonists Tom and Millie are in a long-term relationship facing a period of stagnation. Millie’s new job teaching English at a countryside elementary school fuels her hope that this fresh start and the experience of moving to a new place will reinvigorate their bond. Even without the institutional mandate of Hon’s dystopia, Tom and Millie are subject to the quiet tyranny of social expectations and judgement, which exacerbates their private insecurities. At their going-away party, where their relationship becomes the subject of their friends’ inadvertent assessment, Millie feels the pressure to formalise their relationship, especially in its current languishing state, leading to a public proposal that backfires when Tom hesitates to accept, bringing humiliation upon her. Simultaneously, Tom faces emasculating questions about his unsuccessful music career, with Millie’s brother expressing disappointment that Tom, as a musician, has failed to make his sister “cooler” and is instead following her to the countryside because of the stability of her job. These interactions expose the core of their faltering situation: Millie is thrust into the dominant, managerial role in their lives and relationship, while Tom is perceived as passive and unrealistic, a dreamer who is financially inadequate. Unlike the state-enforced conjoinment in Mending Bodies, the pressure here is social and internalised, but it functions in a similar way, coercing them into maintaining the façade of a loving couple and pushing them towards a conventional “togetherness” whose future remains uncertain.

This relational conflict, arising from the friction between personal autonomy and development and a reluctance to abandon their investment in a long-term relationship, is literalised and intensified as they move to the country town, where external social judgement and their unwillingness to face a decisive separation are replaced by a supernatural compulsion. The catalyst is a casual hike on the trails near their new home, which leads to their accidental fall into an underground cave. There, Tim drinks from a mysterious pond while Millie refuses, transforming their stagnant emotional dynamic into a nightmare of inescapable physical fusion. Shanks’s representation is both terrifying and satirical, first manifesting as a grotesque parody of magnetic attraction. Tim, taking a shower at home, becomes unconscious and is flung against the shower wall by an unseen force, his body scraping along the tiles in painful synchrony with the path of Millie’s departing car. This violation of physical autonomy escalates into a mortifying situation when, overcome by a primal thirst for Millie, Tim abandons his professional commitment to perform as a guitarist in a concert in the city and instead seeks her out at her elementary school. The couple engage in a frantic sexual encounter in the boys’ toilet, nearly discovered by a young student who calls Jamie, Millie’s colleague, to inspect the situation. Their subsequent painful separation, as their bodies are fused together in the act and only achieved through Millie’s violent push, embodies the film’s central paradox: the very togetherness they strive to maintain is not merely a social and cultural construct but is also complicated by the bodily imperative of physical intimacy. The supernatural compulsion represents the human desire to merge through the body, yet this fantasy of total union becomes a terrifying nightmare that is ontologically improbable, for the urge to merge is also a destructive force that threatens to annihilate personal space and identity.

In Mending Bodies, the protagonist is troubled by an existential crisis that manifests most acutely in her debilitating insomnia. This state of perpetual wakefulness is the physical symptom of a mind trapped between irreconcilable pressures and the failure of self-identity. Professor Foot embodies a manipulative contradiction that is no less sinister than the conjoinment mandate. He presents himself as an intellectual mentor who encourages the protagonist to find her own path and confront her fears, yet his illicit fieldwork, which involves taking the protagonist to a motel under the pretext of experiencing conjoinment through experiment and secretly filming the encounter, objectifies her under the guise of helping her attain subjectivity. This mirrors the state’s conjoinment policy, which also claims to offer fulfilment through coercion. He critiques the mechanism of conjoinment while replicating its core violation, the erosion of bodily autonomy and the use of another’s body for one’s own purposes, whether practical, ideological, or voyeuristic. Moreover, the protagonist’s subsequent fieldwork with Bak, the photographer who first appears to her in a dream before their actual meeting, offers no resolution but instead deepens her metaphysical disorientation. Bak’s world is one of haunting liminal spaces and unanswerable questions, as his photographs capture the ambiguous traces of existence and extinction in Ching. The mountain climb with Bak, during which the protagonist asks to see “the things” he sees and uses his body as a ladder to view an “enigmatic blue” sky, becomes a moment of recognition that the perspective of transcendence is also failing her. The vast, sublime blue renders her earthly existence meaningless, creating a hole in her life through which all meaning threatens to drain, a void she finds existentially unbearable. This vision does not integrate her into any new understanding but instead shatters her previous one, as she tells May, “My world has been invaded, crushed, by another world. Any structure or direction that I had has crumbled to pieces.” Both Professor Foot’s manipulation and Bak’s artistic and abstract transcendence bring forms of intrusion that suggest how connections inherently threaten one’s sense of self.

Hoping to remedy her insomnia, the protagonist agrees to conjoin with her sleep therapist, Lok, a decision that pushes her further into the illusion of finding a cure, while the inherent sense of alienation and loss contrasts starkly with the celebratory yet hypocritical joy of those around her. The conjoinment surgery functions as a metaphorical representation of marriage, marked by the announcement of a new identity, “with a new name,” by a lawyer and the presence of relatives and friends celebrating the union. However, this process is portrayed as cold and unsettling. Upon waking, the protagonist feels as though her “body had been hollowed out,” highlighting the emptiness that accompanies this supposed union. The excitement of the crowd, rather than being directed towards the newly conjoined pair, reveals itself as a self-comforting affirmation of their own choices, as the protagonist realises that their cheers “strengthened their beliefs and validated their own choices.” This irony underscores the disjunction between the protagonist’s internal experience and the external façade of joy, suggesting that the act of conjoinment, like marriage, can mask deeper feelings of isolation and loss.

In Mending Bodies, the notable scarcity of the word “love” aligns with the novel’s bleak worldview, as conjoinment becomes merely a survival strategy in which individuals are caught between the dual constraints of losing bodily autonomy and confronting existential absurdity and uncertainty. In such a precarious universe, love appears light and insubstantial, a transient psychological impulse easily mistaken for a solid foundation. This is exemplified by Aunt Myrtle, who, after a hollow career as a model in which she felt like a “perfect filler” for apparel, finds temporary solace in a romantic infatuation with the man in glasses. His “encompassing gaze” offers an illusion of abundance. The intimacy they share and the “great joy” Aunt Myrtle experiences seem sufficient for what most would call love, yet this feeling proves to be a mirage that propels them towards conjoinment, a decision driven by a shared yearning for an aspirational dream of fulfilment. The surgery, however, dispels this romanticised fantasy, bringing not a happy-ever-after but profound disillusionment, as Aunt Myrtle ruefully recounts, “They misjudged the impact distance has on us. Our proximity only accelerated our boredom with each other.” Aunt Myrtle’s journey from infatuation to conjoinment and finally to separation exemplifies the inescapable cycle the protagonist observes. It demonstrates that all bonds are temporary and that the pursuit of connection is futile, serving only as a prelude to a new form of isolation. The protagonist’s reflection culminates in an epiphanic understanding: “Maybe this was a process everyone, Professor Foot, my mother, Bak, Lok, and me, had to go through. We had all involuntarily drifted apart from people we loved, so we each shared an equivalent solitude, we escaped from one kind of solitude, only to fall into yet another.”

Completing the written manuscript of her thesis and handing it to Professor Foot, the protagonist has already realised that her own body constitutes the final and necessary piece of field research, and that true autonomy from her conjoined existence can be achieved only through its radical disassembly. Her suicide is therefore a calculated act of defiance: in confronting death, she asserts a sense of agency that cannot be found in any form of living. Like Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, who rebels against patriarchal oppression, or Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, who seeks freedom from the ideological control of the state and medical authority, the protagonist transforms self-destruction into the ultimate, albeit tragically paradoxical, restoration of self. It is a powerful protest against a world that has fragmented her identity.

In contrast to the protagonist’s choice of self-extinction in Mending Bodies, Tim and Millie undergo a transformation that takes them from sacrifice and confrontation with death to a mutual acceptance of the ritual of body fusion as a means of living as one. After Tim witnesses the monstrous sight of an unsuccessfully fused humanoid form of Simon and Keri, the missing couple who also became victims of the fusion nightmare, he decides to kill himself in front of Millie to save her from a similarly horrific fate. However, as Millie is already gravely injured on the arm by Jamie, who claims that a cut can accelerate the process of fusion, her life ebbs away from the heavy loss of blood that begins to flow towards Tim. He therefore allows his hand to fuse with Millie through the wound, and this confirmation of love culminates in a climactic yet grotesque moment in which the two dance as their bodies complete the final, irrevocable union. But does this difference in ending imply that Together offers a more hopeful perspective on the possibility of love’s salvation? Not necessarily.

The supernatural power that dictates the body fusion of Tim and Millie creates an inescapable situation in which they must either submit to it or become a partially fused monster, as exemplified by Simon and Keri. Although Tim’s decision to sacrifice himself to save Millie is both moving and a powerful expression of love, it still operates within a compelling psychological fear weaponised by the cult’s doctrine, which is substantiated by the magical water of the pond. Jamie, Millie’s colleague who introduces her to Plato’s allegory of the origin of love and soulmates, explains that human beings were originally created with four arms, four legs, and two faces, but were split by Zeus into two separate parts as punishment. This mysterious man, revealed to have been born from a fused gay couple and to be a member of the cult, preaches its doctrine that fusion is divine and makes humans complete: “The connection is deeper than anything you could ever imagine. No more walls. Share fears and memories. This is the hardest part. You just have to push through. What awaits is the ultimate intimacy in divine flesh. You wouldn’t like the alternative.” 

Shanks’s representation may appear to promote love as redemptive and to suggest that fusion in harmony is the only desirable choice for Tim and Millie, yet the supernatural force’s compulsion and the cult’s conviction are precisely what create the story’s ambivalence. Tim and Millie’s so-called achievement of love is not a freely chosen union but rather a psychological surrender to a binary with a horrific alternative. The sentimental quality of Tim’s sacrifice and their “soulmate” affirmation is undermined by the terrifying context; their leap of faith into love functions as a coerced conversion to a cult. We cannot understand the final act of body fusion outside the film’s fundamentally satirical treatment, which indirectly critiques New Age rhetoric about soulmates and similar tropes of love such as the twin flames, by presenting love not as an a priori truth but as a narrative that depends upon myth-making. The subjective experience of love may be authentic, yet it relies on a quasi-religious conception of a fateful love that promises wholeness through another. The cultish faith is exposed as just as illusory and coercive as the social internalisation of conjoinment in Mending Bodies, for both are belief systems that promote a misleading ontology pretending to offer an answer.

How to cite: Ng, Charlie. “The Fantasy of Wholeness through Body Horror in Hon Lai-chu’s Mending Bodies and Michael Shanks’s Together.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Oct. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/10/08/body-horror.

Charlie Ng is currently teaching at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of Hong Kong Metropolitan University. She studied English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and graduated with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry can be found in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. [All contributions by Charlie Ng.]

---