4 days ago
12
Addison Heimann’s “Touch Me” opens with several meandering minutes of clunky, sketch-like exposition as we hear Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) recount to her therapist what is supposed to be a wild, entertaining romp of a story about how she had sex with a tentacled alien. Think: those recurring Close Encounters sketches about alien abduction leading to escalating lewdness on “Saturday Night Live,” though without any of Kate McKinnon’s charm or comedic timing.
The film that follows — flatly repetitive with far too many wildly misguided and self-serious moments — is turgid from start to finish, as its haphazard attempts at silliness clash with the bizarre way it seems to also want to grapple with trauma. Yes, a movie about tentacled alien sex tries (and fails) to tackle more serious subjects between the tiresome jokes it desperately shouts at its audience in the hope that it will wear you down into feeling something, anything.
It’s an unintentionally dour and bleak vision whose opening, an already overused framing device that reduces the story to being essentially one long flashback, feels like it wouldn’t be out of place in a Neil Breen production. Alas, “Touch Me” is never as chaotically entertaining as that, instead playing out in what is almost entirely one location (a mansion it seems like the story was built around because of how oddly tied down to it everything remains) and forced emotional register that’s neither silly nor scary enough to earn the film its horror comedy bona fides.
With one overlong, obnoxious scene after another, the only thing “Touch Me” gets right is that you, too, will want to talk to your therapist about it, as you ponder how a film this disastrous can also keep insisting on itself this much.
The one doing most of that insisting is struggling former foster kid Joey, as she, along with her annoyingly insecure friend/roommate Craig (Jordan Gavaris), spends her time vaping and drinking the days away. When a mountain of feces suddenly, inexplicably explodes like a geyser in their bathroom and can’t be stopped, they move into the remote mansion of Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), an alien in human form with addictive healing powers, with whom Joey has a sexual history.
This awkwardly hip-thrusting, hip-hop dancing man (who looks most like a yassified version of the NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere) soon casts a spell over the best friends with his dance moves. We witness these in a couple of extended scenes, which are never as funny as the film seems to believe them to be. Instead, the humor relies solely on how “weird” they supposedly are, when they are actually stiffly choreographed and staged.
‘Touch Me’Still, the joke is that they somehow work on the duo, who now each want to have “interspecies intercourse” with him, leading to scattered notes of jealousy between them. It exists to provide a contrived conflict that goes nowhere and is more flatly forced than it is ever consistently funny. This is all part of Brian’s vaguely sketched master plan to take over the world as we know it by spreading his seed far and wide.
If this sounds like it could be at least chaotically exciting or like a John Waters-inspired jaunt into absurdity, the film never comes close to executing on this potential. Everything from the experience of the fragmented tentacle sex scenes to all of the mulling about that comes between is lifeless and exhausting.
There is also a magical crystal in the mansion that the trio gathers around to confess their past traumas to before spilling blood on it, secret rooms where they have erotic encounters with Brian, a prisoner that he is holding hostage, and so much extra nonsense that audiences might wonder if they’re being pranked. In addition to serving primarily as filler in a film perpetually going nowhere fast, none of these elements is well-designed or shot. For all the color changes that it does to signal how wacky it is, everything is overlit and awkwardly framed.
“Touch Me” also keeps repeatedly falling back on everything from jarringly distracting sitcom-esque thought bubbles to an insufferable use of slow-motion and superficial split-screen framing, all of which makes it feel as though the editing process involved taking a look at all the most outdated iMovie-esque effects before deciding to use as many as it possibly could.
Plenty of low-budget horror films manage to creatively overcome budget limitations — there is just no such luck here. Where Heimann’s previous film, “Hypochondriac,” which gets a brief reference here via a mask Joey wears at the beginning, was a flawed yet still more sturdy exploration of a character unraveling, “Touch Me” is shaky in every aspect of its storytelling.
All of this would be disappointing on its own, but “Touch Me” becomes so out of its depth in terms of how it engages with the trauma it excavates, that it’s hard to take seriously. There can be great films that are both about abuse and remain incisively funny, though this is not one of them.
Instead, Heimann is so focused on the spectacle of it all that he forgets to do anything with it emotionally or formally, dragging everything to a close, as we return back to the beginning with little of anything meaningful or engaging occurring over the film’s running time. Whatever Joey’s therapist is charging her by the hour, it isn’t enough.
Grade: D-
Yellow Veil Pictures will release “Touch Me” in limited theaters on Friday, March 20.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
English (US) ·