Addison Heimann's "Touch Me" isn't a film you watch so much as one you surrender to-willingly or not.
This psychosexual sci-fi-horror channels the hazy sensuality of late 1960s Japanese cinema and the warped erotica of forgotten paperback pulp.
It feels like stumbling across a long-lost 1970s art-house reel in a dusty projection booth, spliced straight into your nightmares.
The premise is deceptively intimate. Two inseparable friends bound by unspoken desire spiral into a surreal, carnal odyssey when their fragile bond fractures.
It opens in a therapist's office, where Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley)-plagued by OCD and childhood trauma-confides about meeting a seductive alien lover whose touch not only brought ecstasy but seemingly cured her anxieties overnight.
What begins as a breakup unravels into depression, obsessive rituals, and the invasive touch of something not quite human.
This is trauma and longing stripped to their rawest nerve-the volatile tension when the friend you care for most (Craig, played by Jordan Gavaris) wrestles with his own anxiety and seeks a healing touch that threatens to come between them.
Heimann's personal imprint is everywhere, from the smallest quirks to the grotesque. Joey's compulsive ear-cleaning with cotton buds escalates into bloody self-injury, a raw, lived-in truth transformed into monstrous art.
The horror draws from the mythic and the obscene. A tentacled sea creature-evoking the infamous 19th-century print "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife"-emerges not just as a monster, but as a metaphor for craving, violation, and transcendence.
Heimann's psychedelic, handcrafted creature (played by Lou Taylor Pucci) channels the tactile surrealism of 1970s genre cinema rather than modern CGI gloss.
For all its bodily terror and tantric encounters, "Touch Me" is equally about the brutal emotional violence of jealousy and co-dependency, the psychic wounds that obsession and fantasy try to seal.
Absurd flashes of levity-like a gleeful hip-hop dance sequence from another universe-cut through the heaviness without breaking the spell.
Its hypnotic surrealism and fractured narrative will frustrate some; without context, it can feel like a fever dream reminiscent of Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981).
At a NIFFF 2025 Q&A, Heimann illuminated moments that mystified me-without that insight, the film's dream logic might remain elusive.
Still, its visual and carnal power is undeniable. Saturated colors and grainy textures pulse like blood, while split-screens, surreal interludes, and showers of severed limbs keep the eye riveted-if not always the heart.
Touch Me proves Heimann has a distinct point of view and plenty on his mind, riffing on modern anxieties from climate collapse to the fragility of creative livelihoods.
His flair for odd characters and sensual visual language lingers long after the credits roll.
Watching it is like reading an illicit, water-damaged paperback by flashlight-dangerous, alluring, impossible to put down.
A lush, hypnotic, perversely tender psychosexual nightmare-one you don't just watch. You give yourself to it.
And in surrendering, you might recognize your own compulsions, your own fractures, your own desperate craving for escape.
