TOUCH ME Film Review: An Unapologetically Strange Allegory of Abuse and Trauma
Touch Me is an unapologetically strange midnight horror that uses its offbeat premise to probe trauma, addiction, and the bonds of codependency. It’s a midnight-movie in every sense – intentionally uncomfortable and eccentric – and it knows it won’t be for everyone. After debuting in Sundance’s Midnight section and following up with a showing at SXSW, it has now made its Canadian premiere at Fantasia.
Yellow Veil Pictures has picked up Touch Me for North American distribution, championing its unique blend of psychosexual sci-fi and emotional pain. The result is a film that is undeniably weird, yet its strangeness serves a purpose: underneath the tentacles and dark humour lies a frank conversation about cycles of abuse and trauma, and how difficult it can be to escape these perpetual patterns.
What Is Touch Me About?
Touch Me follows two drifting best friends, Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris, as they are doing what they can to scrape by in life. When Joey’s ex-boyfriend Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) suddenly resurfaces, they find themselves brought together even more closely. Brian is no ordinary ex – he shows up ominously dressed in a retro space-age jumpsuit, with a Jesus-like beard, claiming to be an alien with a gift to offer. One touch from him induces pure euphoria, a high that washes away anxiety and emotional pain.
What unfolds is a bizarre love triangle of trauma, abuse, and codependency. Brian’s touch brings bliss followed by craving, and access to the next “fix” comes at an ever-increasing cost. Once at the compound, Joey and Craig find that comfort is deliberately rationed: Brian controls who gets his therapeutic touch, when they get it, and under what terms.
Direction and Style in Touch Me
Writer–director Addison Heimann shows a fearless commitment to form and style, making it immediately clear that Touch Me will play by its own rules. Heimann opens with an excruciating sequence involving a Q-tip and follows that by an extended therapy monologue delivered by Joey, captured in a single unbroken shot with a slow, creeping push-in. The speech is deliberately naturalistic, with pauses, hedges, and “likes”, and that grounded realism becomes the gateway to buying the supernatural later. This early one-two punch reinforces the notion that Heimann is willing to buck conventions when it comes to certain plot beats and narrative structure. These first moments essentially tell us that this film will zigzag in tone and pacing: moments of grotesquerie and dark comedy will collide with stretches of intimacy and vulnerability.
Heimann’s previous feature (Hypochondriac, 2022) was also a personal horror story that played at Fantasia, and in Touch Me, he doubles down on mixing the deeply personal with the bizarrely “genre”. The camera grammar toggles between patient holds and super-quick movements like crash-zooms and whip-pans, and the sound design performs similar functions. When Touch Me wants to provoke a laugh or a jolt, the sound cues are exaggerated, but in its more serious moments, layers of subtle ambient sound (a low throbbing pulse like a heartbeat, distant creaks, etc.) create an inescapable anxiety and feeling of impending doom.
Trauma, Addiction, and the Cycles of Abuse
Beneath its sci-fi exterior, Touch Me offers a pointed metaphor for addiction, abuse, and trauma. Brian’s otherworldly touch is essentially a drug: a quick hit of euphoria that temporarily alleviates Joey’s anxiety and emotional turmoil, only to leave her craving more once the effect fades. The film doesn’t treat this conceit as a gimmick – it is the very engine of the plot and theme. Access to Brian’s “cure” comes with strings attached, and those strings provide control. In clear, unforgiving terms, Touch Me illustrates how an abuser can weaponize relief and hope, keeping victims tethered. Brian creates a cycle: pain, relief, dependency. Feel bad, get a fix, feel good for a moment, then feel even worse, repeat. It’s a cycle familiar to anyone who has observed substance abuse or toxic relationships.
The film also nods to the psychological traps that keep people in such cycles. At one point, Craig tells Joey, “… you went back to him, so it couldn’t have been that bad, right?” This reflects the much too common external minimisation of abuse. This external minimisation quickly turns into internalised blame, as Joey wonders if maybe she “deserved” what happened. Touch Me doesn’t belabour these points with preachy monologues; it simply presents these casual lines in context, showing how easily even friends or victims themselves can reframe horrific experiences as normal. In doing so, the film captures the insidious way abuse perpetuates: through denial and rationalization, as much as through active manipulation.
Despite the heavy subject matter, Touch Me walks a tonal tightrope by using irony and dark humour to expose uncomfortable truths. The film is often sarcastic about the very idea of “healing” culture that Brian exploits. One scene has a character earnestly declare a self-help platitude, only for the next cut to blatantly contradict that earnestness. In its sharpest moments, the film’s humour is in service of its theme: we laugh because we recognise a painful truth in the absurdity.
However, that balance does waver occasionally. Certain “flourishes” provide momentary comic relief, but they also soften the impact of the trauma being depicted. While these lighter elements don’t derail the film’s message, they do at times dilute the tension. Touch Me is at its strongest when its oddball sense of humour reinforces the theme. When the humour veers into pure camp, the film momentarily loses that razor edge. Still, even with a few tonal missteps, Touch Me remains honest about the core of trauma’s cycle: one can know that something (or someone) is harmful and yet be drawn back again and again if it offers even a fleeting refuge from pain.
Is Touch Me Worth a Watch?
Your answer to that will depend on your appetite for midnight movies and provocative metaphors. Touch Me is deliberately messy – tonally elastic, oscillating between sincerity and silliness – and for folks who appreciate horror films that take risks and mix pungent social commentary with gooey genre trappings, this film offers a distinctly original experience.
At the end of the day, one thing is certain: Addison Heimann has a voice. Love it or hate it, Touch Me feels like the product of a singular vision, one that merges the personal and the preposterous. It’s not a film for everyone – many will find it too weird, too tonally inconsistent, or simply too uncomfortable. Still, for those who resonate with it, Touch Me will add a new and unique project to many watch (and re-watch) lists.
