Eye For Film >> Movies >> Touch Me (2025) Film Review
Touch Me
Reviewed by: Jennie Kermode
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Have you ever been so excited by one specific person that all you wanted was for them to touch you – any part of you – because the feeling was like being struck by electricity? At the other end of the scale of life experiences, have you ever been so miserable that you seem to have a voice inside your head all the time reminding you of it? What if the former experience could cure the latter? Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) finds something truly sensational in Brian (Lou Taylor Pucchi), as we see her explaining to her therapist at the start of this film. It might have been perfect, if only he’d respected her boundaries; if only she hadn’t been afraid that her head might explode.
Part of the Midnight strand at Sundance 2025, Touch Me is the latest work by Addison Heimann, whose début, Hypochondriac, wowed the festival circuit in 2022. It’s similarly inventive and likewise explores themes of mental illness and co-dependency.
The emotional core of it lies not in Joey’s connection to her lover but in her bond with flatmate and gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), who took her in after she fled Brian, asking no questions. Their life together isn’t perfect either. They live off his family’s money, but he’s bad at asking for it, just as she’s bad at getting work. He’s insecure, worried about his figure, worried about dates that never seem to work out. Both of them have real trauma in their pasts but they’re not great at dealing with it, or even at talking about it. For all her wariness of Brian, when he calls with the offer of a therapeutic weekend out at his place, they decide that it could be just what they need.
There are complications, of course. There’s the fact that Craig quickly develops a crush on Brian too, and it might be mutual. There’s the presence of Brian’s jealous assistant, Laura (Marlene Forte). And then there’s the fact that Brian is an alien. To be fair, he’s been upfront about that from the start – there had to be some explanation for his affinity for tracksuits, never mind the tentacles that emerge when he’s excited. but there are other things that Brian hasn’t been quite so open about, and as events develop, our human heroes come to suspect that he might not be the chilled out dude on a mission to save Earth from climate change that they first took him for.
This will doubtless sound to some of you like, well, a bit much – a feast of quirk with little real substance. Heimann knows his craft, however, and holds it together surprisingly well. It finds an element of dark comedy when considered alongside the lies people tell themselves and the absurdities they put up with in order to stay in unhealthy relationships. Heimann’s triumph is in achieving this without coming across as mocking victims themselves. It’s the situation that delivers the strangeness – and charm – mediated by Dudley’s performance as a woman who is self-deprecating and messy but lively enough to root for.
There’s a real affection for genre film here, and its clichés are deployed in a way that works for the film, supporting its comedy rather than making it look weak. At about the halfway point, Heimann indulges in a gorgeously shot black and white horror sequence which counterpoints the kitschiness of the predominant aesthetic and very effectively shifts the mood. Like the prospect of a one night stand with an alien, the film will inspire some viewers to rush towards it whilst others flee, with few remaining undecided. Matters of taste aside, however, it’s impressively well constructed, and a great piece of storytelling.
Reviewed on: 30 Jan 2025