‘Touch Me Movie Review [Fantasia 2025]: Tentacle Sex, Trauma, and Flat Execution

Photo from Fantasia Film Festival

From Jeff Nelson

Touch Me, Addison Heimann’s sophomore effort, is a neon-drenched psychosexual trip with a more distinct artistic vision than Hypochondriac, his feature debut. He tackles toxic codependency in all of its forms with a compelling hook, but it doesn’t quite come together.

Aimless best friends Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are at the end of their rope. They’re both unemployed and weighed down by past traumas, relying on vapes and alcohol to cope. Joey and Craig are forced to confront their greatest demons when she reconnects with her track-suit-wearing alien ex-boyfriend, Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), who claims he intends to save Earth from the climate change that destroyed his planet.

The movie opens with Joey’s therapy session, where she recounts how she met her extraterrestrial ex-boyfriend. It’s an outrageous monologue that sounds like a total fantasy, but her tone is dead serious. Their interspecies sex temporarily lifts the world’s worries off her shoulders, until a terrifying encounter leaves her running to Craig’s house, and she’s been living with him ever since. However, he’s no responsible shoulder to cry on. He has his own traumas and intimacy issues, failing even to secure a Grindr hookup when he attempts to disguise his femininity for a man who seeks sex with another masculine-acting man. Craig only lives in his home thanks to his father’s money.

Brian welcomes Joey and Craig into his extravagant home with open arms after a plumbing issue in Craig’s home that he can’t afford to fix. They move in alongside his human helper, Laura (Marlene Forte), who doesn’t like her employer’s ex-girlfriend. Joey slips back into her sexual relationship with Brian, but it doesn’t take long for an envious Craig to yearn for the muscular alien.

Heimann blends Japanese media (particularly hentai’s outlandish eroticism) with Gregg Araki’s off-kilter tone. Alien sex fills the void for Joey and Craig, clouding their minds with addiction. It doesn’t go quite as far as expected, but it certainly isn’t afraid to get weird, a mood heightened by Dustin Supencheck’s vibrant cinematography. 

This retreat forces the two best friends to vocalize their traumas with the promise of healing, in the forms of tentacle sex and a ritualistic crystal room. Heimann’s take on sexual trauma and abuse feels undeveloped and strangely interpreted. He finds greater success in his approach to co-dependency. 

The movie doesn’t fulfill the promise it makes in Joey’s bizarre monologue, which is marvelously delivered by Dudley. This alien sex affair loses all tension and humor in the flat cat-and-mouse game of a climax. While Touch Me is admirably ambitious, it doesn’t do enough with its sensory-charged premise.

Rating: 2.5/5

Touch Me played at Fantasia 2025 on August 2nd.

Follow Jeff