(L–R) Marlene Forte, Lou Taylor Pucci, Addison Heimann, Jordan Gavaris, and Olivia Taylor Dudley attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Touch Me” at The Ray Theatre on January 28, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Donyale West/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“‘Hey, would you be into this weird movie with like tentacle alien sex and a bunch of weird shit?’”
That’s how actor Olivia Taylor Dudley (Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, 2023 Sundance Film Festival) recounts her good friend, producer David Lawson Jr., had first asked her if she would be interested in reading the script for writer-director Addison Heimann’s genre-bending erotic sci-fi feature, Touch Me. An hour after reading it, Dudley met with Heimann to discuss the film.
“We both share the mental illness of obsessive compulsive disorder and anxiety, and we just kind of talked about that for hours. That was the thing that I related to the most in the script,” Dudley tells Touch Me’s post-premiere audience in The Ray Theatre on January 28. “And then after those two hours, [Heimann] asked me if I wanted to do the movie. And I was like, ‘Oh. I mean, fuck yes, it’s so weird.’ A month later we were shooting.”
In response, Heimann gives a shout out to Dudley’s eight-minute monologue of a therapy session that opens the film. “First day, first shot, first take,” he clarifies. The audience goes wild for her performance.
Touch Me, debuting in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, plays on absurdity through the lens of contemporary realism. Roommates Craig (Jordan Gavaris) and Joey (Dudley) are two adults just trying to pay their rent, score with a hot date, and get stoned when they need to calm down sometimes. Their friendship is codependent not because they’re attached through sentimental devotion, but because they need each other to help balance finances or reassure an anxious spiral. When their apartment becomes uninhabitable due to a sudden plumbing disaster, Joey calls Brian (Sundance veteran Lou Taylor Pucci), the alien with whom she had an intense sexual relationship, even though she knows he’s toxic for her. Unfortunately, what’s bad for us is exactly the mental reward we can’t resist. And in Joey’s case, bringing Craig along turns into an otherworldly pansexual love triangle that risks Earth’s safety and puts the roommates’ commitment to their friendship on the line, all for the intoxicating slithers, thrusts, and squeezes of Brian’s alien-form tentacle touch.
When asked about his influences during the post-premiere Q&A, Heimann says that while studying Japanese for five years, he developed a deep obsession with Japanese culture and cinema from the 1960s and ’70s, including Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s House, pink films (independent erotic movies), and exploitation films. “Basically everything [Quentin] Tarantino did for Kill Bill, I was like, ‘Mine too,’” Heimann explains, since he also wanted to include women’s revenge, bright colors, and swords in the script. Obviously, tentacle-filled references to hentai (sexually explicit Japanese anime and manga) also show up.
“I think my version of why this movie exists the way it is is that it’s kind of an entire exploration of my obsessive compulsive disorder,” Heimann says. “I think having this thing, it’s both tragic and hilarious at the same time, and that’s how I kind of view the world. So of course in the same moment we’re talking about some deep-seated trauma that me and other people have gone through in my life, we’re also doing hip-hop dancing and lifting people in the air via tentacle sex and cutting off people’s heads and arms.”
With his cast and crew onstage beside him, Heimann adds, “You don’t make film in a vacuum. You make film with the people in front of you.” With loud applause, the audience agrees. “You make movies by consensus, and I view the world like this. I feel like the world is topsy-turvy, there’s so much crazy shit happening in the world. I always want to make queer movies that are genre films that explore mental illness, and that —” Heimann points to the theater’s film screen behind him, “ — is what pooped out of my brain.”
