Sean Parker
Olivia Taylor Dudley’s 2025 is going very well. The actress was last seen during the Chattanooga Film Festival’s virtual showcase, giving a dramatically engrossing performance in the cult-aftermath movie Abigail Before Beatrice, and now in Fantasia’s Canadian Premiere of Addison Heimann’s Touch Me. Dudley is becoming a staple of indie cinema, undertaking memorable parts in Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, the Henry Thomas crime-thriller Crawlspace, and Amy Seimetz’s feminist premonition-horror She Dies Tomorrow. If you don’t know Olivia Taylor Dudley yet, it may be time to start paying attention, and Touch Me may be a good way to get to know what this talented actress is capable of.
Dudley begins the film in a therapy session, unleashing a powerful monologue that details her character Joey’s sexual encounter with an alien being as the camera pulls tighter and tighter to the actress. Heimann captures the claustrophobia of possibly isolating oneself by revealing a story of this weight that includes moments of tenderness before descending into a more harmful tale. As Joey describes her ex-boyfriend Brian (Spring’s Lou Taylor Pucci), she describes his touch as something analogous to heroin. She describes her difficulty in trying to leave that behind, as she recently showed up on the steps of her gay best friend, Craig (Hacks’ Jordan Gavaris).
First of all, what an opening scene. It’s raw and affecting, and it’s all thanks to Dudley’s unflinching performance. But as the film juxtaposes into Joey and Craig’s life of skirting work and living off of Craig’s wealthy parents, the tone shifts into the comedic as Heimann positions his codependent Gen Z protagonists to accept an invitation from Brian to his vast estate when they discover the money has run out. It almost undoes the first sequence entirely by making you think Joey may have been making up the whole thing. Heimann’s Hypochondriac has similar tonal elements, though the shifts in that darkly comedic film aren’t nearly as jarring. Hypochondriac was one of my favorite festival indies back when it released in 2022, as it presented mental illness with frightening realism, making those shifts feel slightly more appropriate.
In Touch Me, Heimann considers addiction and abuse through his characters, and tries to do so with a light touch. Sometimes it works, and sometimes there’s internal frustration. Pucci, who I believe is extraordinarily underrated, makes Brian extremely charming. A bit of an underachieving being who wears track suits and doesn’t seem to do anything but eat and f*ck all day… seemingly a perfect match to the Craig and Joey aesthetic. But there are the obvious Twilight Zone undertones brought on by his inclination “To Serve Man,” as well as his Renfieldesque steward in Marlene Forte’s Laura.
As Brian begins to find attraction in Joey and Craig’s codependency, he wants to become a part of it and begins pursuing both of them. While Joey has completely relapsed via Brian’s touch, Craig finds similar drug-seeking behaviors. He wants to be with Brian, too, creating a love triangle that soon becomes an entanglement of jealousy for all of the characters.
Heimann’s features have been distinctly non-conforming, and I honestly like the narrative shake-up from the traditional save-the-cat beats. His style is suited to this type of dark comedy, where you might want to laugh if the whole thing weren’t so super awkward. Touch Me is pitch black when it comes to laughs, and that can be fun to see at times. But this tale of love and addiction, as if going back to an abusive relationship, is also infused with a bit of heaviness that ultimately provides a conflicted feeling in the pit of your stomach over the empathetic nature of the film. Craig and Joey are not great people, but Heimann treats his characters well, and it’s the pull of past trauma compared with the inhuman nature of others that makes us see how these characters have arrived at this space in time.
I was really conflicted at the end of Touch Me. There are sequences I love and others I detest, which is probably how characters like Joey would describe their toxic relationships. I think a movie is only as good as it can stir something, good or bad, within you. Heimann’s feature irrevocably succeeds in that. The acting and direction of the film is very well done, but in satirically presenting addiction as provocation, it doesn’t exactly leave you feeling good. Regardless, this is also a work of fiction, and Heimann arcs his characters’ terrible natures with the disposition of doing better moving forward. It’s certainly a film that considers the spiraling lows and the euphoric highs of these situations, but it can also be very challenging for a comedy.
Touch Me played at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival on Thursday, July 31, with an encore showing on Saturday, August 2. Check out the film’s page on the Fantasia website for more information.
