Sundance ‘25: Touch Me

Now, let’s preface that this movie is not for everyone. As writer/director Addison Heinmann put it at the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, with a jumping high kick no less: “It’s for the weirdos!” And boy is he right. Touch Me is for the weirdos who want to be shocked and confronted with a deliciously campy, sensory overload fever dream that happens to include a few hentai scenes. Oh, and it’s a very horny movie. If Heinmann’s goal was to put tentacle porn into the mainstream, well, Sundance is certainly a place to make it happen. 

Touch Me kicks off with an eight-minute, one-take monologue from Joey (a brilliantly deadpan Olivia Taylor Dudley) summarizing what other filmmakers would’ve made into a full feature. Girl meets alien, girl falls in love, girl gets addicted to tentacle sex, tentacle sex becomes too much, girl escapes and finds independence. But Heinman decides to make a full film’s plot simply the prologue, and in essence keys us into the hidden mysteries of his world and the withdrawal following Joey around. With a mix of addiction recovery and arrested development, Joey is trying (read, failing) to get her life back on track, not without the help of her codependent, messy BFF Craig (a hyperkinetic Jordan Gavaris), who showers her with a safe haven, endless vapes and his own shame. 

It’s not long before the two adults run away from a plumbing mishap and into the arms of Brian the alien, played by Lou Talyor Pucci with all the wit, sorrow, manipulation, and pity that an alien would learn from watching a reality TV show. When we first meet Brian, he’s doing a meditative breakdance ritual in a velvety purple tracksuit with flowing black hair (one can’t help but think of Jared Leto’s narcissistic culty-event back in 2020). Anyone who parades like Jesus—even a gyrating, ripped, chicken nugget-eating Jesus—can’t be a good sign. 

Joey falls back into her drug: the healing touch of Brian and the sensual pleasure of his tentacles. And soon, so does Craig, overwhelmed by the alien’s beauty and overly curious if Joey’s hentai stories are true. An alien-human throuple begins, or as Brian calls it “interspecies intercourse,” and the bloody, horny, drama takes flight. 

As with most horror movies and erotic thrillers, the sex is hiding something. It hides the truth we escape from, the truth hidden behind fleeting bliss. Heinmann doesn’t hold back showing the faults of our characters. It’s refreshing to see a filmmaker dive straight into their characters’ psyches, making audiences see the most unlikable versions of themselves on screen. Joey and Craig learn this the hard way—with a few splatterings of blood—and they must look past their own self-hatred, addictions, and enabling tendencies to either succumb to Brian’s alluring touch or dig themselves out of their own graves.

Touch Me is a challenging film at times and may lose some people; even this viewer wasn’t totally sure where it was heading all the way through. But that freewheeling dive into an interspecies, hip-hop infused, sex-addicted throuple is on par for the spiral of addiction and the mountain of recovery. It’s undoubtedly one of the strangest films of 2025—hell, this decade—and we should all be thankful that Heinmann is making movies for the weirdos.

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