As someone who has been sounding the horn on this year’s emerging theme of kink as plot for awhile now, Touch Me seemed like an easy box to check, it stars the incredible Olivia Taylor Dudley of The Magicians’ fame and her gay bestie played by Jordan Jarvaris as they navigate a reconnection with her toxic alien ex. So if the phrase “live-action hentai” is a draw for you at all, you may also have come across this trailer in your travels. The movie has some major overlap in concepts with a Mexican psycho-sexual horror film from last decade called The Untamed, which I remember having to acquire on DVD because of its difficulty finding a streaming partner after a very limited release, if that gives you any idea how much the landscape has changed since then.
Touch Me is taking a lot of big swings for a humble little four-person-cast horror film. It starts with a single take monologue by Dudley that spans more than five minutes, one of a couple different monologues in the movie. The film revels in long, lovingly crafted mirror scenes which copy the premise of the earlier bit for comic effect but also the absurdity of its repetition. The movie spends a lot of time plunging the depths of sexual trauma in ways that feel a little empty as monologues, like stage performances of backstory that announce one’s inner motivations for present action and actively work against the genre’s expectations as flirty, quirky, and absurdist, but your mileage may vary, based on how much you appreciate the feat of the gargantuan single takes in and of themselves as extended, high-wire character sketches.
