SXSW 2025 Review: TOUCH ME, The Tentacled Erotic Horror Comedy You Didn't Know You Needed

Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and Craig (Jordan Gavaris) are besties. Joey is a single gal trying to find something to inspire her ambition, and Craig is a relatively lazy – but charming – guy living off his family money. When the house they share is rendered unlivable due to a catastrophic plumbing collapse that leaves it smelling like poop, Joey suggests that they inquire about staying with her weird ex, Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci). What’s so weird about him? Well, apparently, he’s an alien whose physical touch leaves humans in a heroin-like state of liberating ecstasy that drains all worry from their bodies. But he’s hot. Could be worse.

When Brian welcomes the pair into his ethereal compound, Joey slips back into old habits and rekindles, leading the trio – along with Brian’s personal assistant Laura (Marlene Forte) – down a very entrancing, and potentially deadly, road. As Joey and Craig find themselves drawn into Brian’s esoteric sphere, they begin to unravel the mystery of what he is and why he’s here. Oh, and it’s a comedy.

Touch Me is directed by Addison Heimann, whose more serious trauma horror Hypochondriac premiered at SXSW back in 2022, shows the filmmaker playing in a very different sandbox that with his debut feature. Still examining the faults and foibles that make us human, this time around Heimann uses comedy to temper the horror of codependence and the cycles from which we can’t break free. It’s part absurdist, gross-out romp, part erotic thriller, and part lo-fi sci-fi that is much more even than his first film, marking considerable progress behind the camera.

The film opens with Joey talking to her therapist about this man that she met, describing not only the tremendous physical relationship she experienced with Brian, but also getting into the alien of it all, immediately putting the audience off guard. As this monologue continues, the tone is set, with this speech, we have an idea of how to settle in for this ride, if not exactly what the destination may be.

Heimann’s direction leans heavily toward camp, with each of our four co-leads – I’ll add Forte in there – delivering over-the-top characterizations that help to soft any rough edges the film may have in depicting its more cosmic elements. At first Brian just seems like a rich kook, he and Laura adorned in matching tracksuits – the only thing he’ll wear – and sporting an aggressive beard that neither Joey nor Craig are able to resist.

Touch Me fills each frame with intense pink and purple lighting, indicating a sort of fluid neon sexuality that permeates the film’s essence. The sex scenes here are deliriously executed, bathed in these lights, often shot in artsy silhouette that accentuates the absurdity of it all as Brian’s physical form writhes and transforms into something other than human, and irresistible mass of tentacles aching to fill every need (and every hole) possible.

It’s rare that something this confidently unique finds its way out into the world, but Touch Me is destined to find a dedicated fan base who love eroticism and goo and don’t mind a little cringe in the mix. Heimann eschews the less obvious, more grim metaphor of his first film in favor of something more fun, and it really works for him. Touch Me is the extraterrestrial erotic horror comedy that audiences didn’t know they were missing.