This provocative genre mash-up has good performances but is ultimately dull.
Last Updated on January 30, 2025
PLOT: Two best friends (Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris) encounter a tracksuit-wearing alien (Lou Taylor Pucci) whose touch is so powerful that it can relieve past trauma…for a while anyway.
REVIEW: Every year at Sundance, there’s a movie that I see that – for some reason or another – just isn’t for me, even though I can tell there’s definitely an appreciative audience out there for it. Last year, it was I Saw the TV Glow (which became a breakout hit) and this year it’s Touch Me. Despite the low-budget and deliberately campy aesthetic, this blend of sci-fi, horror and comedy should earn plenty of fans. However, I must admit I’m not one even if there are things about it I can appreciate. This is one of those movies where the phrase “it wasn’t for me” would suffice.
Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris play Joey and Craig two co-dependent best friends – she’s straight, he’s gay, and neither quite has their shit together. He lives on a trust fund that’s paying for some past misdeeds done by his family while she’s in withdrawal from a relationship that ended with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), who she says was an alien whose touch was like heroin. Despite it ending traumatically, when Brian resurfaces and invites her away for the weekend, it doesn’t take much convincing for her to agree and bring Craig along for support. Soon, they both become hopelessly addicted to his touch, even once they discover that – well – he just might be trying to take over the planet.
Despite the sci-fi trappings, the heart of the film is the co-dependent relationship between Joey and Craig, which is a shame as it’s the least interesting aspect of the film. Once both Craig and Joey enter into a sexual relationship with Brian, that becomes as pivotal as the fact that Brian’s a remorseless killer who might want to colonize the planet.
The folks that will most likely get the most out of this are hentai fans, with the film going to great lengths to depict live-action sex scenes that seem lifted from the kinds of manga you could only buy in certain comic shops. The cast is solid, with Olivia Taylor Dudley starting the film with a terrific monologue about her last encounter with Brian. However, Gavaris’s semi-comic role as Craig is more conventional and less thought out. Of them all, Lou Taylor Pucci gives the most memorable performance as the otherworldly Brian, who’s like a perverted, evil Starman, while Marlene Forte plays his live-in assistant, who acts almost like his familiar, were he a vampire.
Touch Me spins its wheels with a lot of icky creature effects that, despite being lo-fi, are effective, even if you start to lose interest in the plight of Joey and Craig, who turn out to be backstabbing junkies once they get addicted to Brian’s touch. The movie makes the point that, perhaps, the thing they’re really addicted to is each other, but it’s all done in a way that doesn’t feel particularly innovative at a place like Sundance, which has premiered some cutting-edge stuff. Touch Me is provocative but dull, with it ultimately sidelining a good sci-fi story for an overly familiar gay man/ straight woman friendship story that’s been done better elsewhere.
