Rating: NR | Runtime: 100 minutes
Release Date: March 20th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Yellow Veil Pictures
Director(s): Addison Heimann
Writer(s): Addison Heimann

I feel like these days it’s impossible to deny the existence of aliens, I just never thought the way I’d find out would be live action hentai.

Joey’s (Olivia Taylor Dudley) psychologist asks her to tell an outlandish story that intentionally hides the truth of her trauma as a means of exposure therapy. The idea is that the crazier it sounds, the greater her ability will be to stop letting it rule her every waking moment. So, she talks about the violent night shared with a man she thought she loved as though he was an alien who didn’t realize his addictive and abusive hold. She ran only to discover she had nowhere to go.

This yarn gives us pause because we’ve been made to believe Addison Heimann’s Touch Me is quite literally about a woman who can’t kick the anxiety-calming drug secreted from an extraterrestrial’s tentacle-like appendages. Is what we’re about to watch therefore a fantasy? Or is Joey’s actual trauma too weird to be made weirder and she’s merely feeding this doctor the truth under the guise of a lie? We’ll soon find out when Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) arrives.

Because there he is wearing that stupid track suit. There he is touching her face with a glowing light that soothes the chaos in her mind. Unless, of course, that also isn’t real. That Joey only thinks she saw Brian queuing up behind her because of the PTSD. It’s honestly tough to know where the line between farce and tragedy lies when the reality of Joey’s life is marred by a bathroom geyser of excrement and extremely rude barista-abusing strangers.

It’s through that plumbing issue’s reveal of the dire straits confronting both Joey and her best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) that we can fully embrace the film’s tone since their only solution (being that her trauma won’t allow her to keep a job and his won’t let him ask his parents for help since it was their negligence that allowed his suffering to happen in the first place) is to go to Brian’s compound and prove to the audience that he is in fact real, sex-crazed, and an alien.

Written at a time when Heimann wished there was some way to alleviate his OCD while also going through what he calls a “profoundly sad friendship breakup,” Touch Me unfolds as a madcap descent towards Joey’s personal rock bottom. Not only must she go back to the ex that exacerbated an already heavy dose of psychological scarring yet to be fully revealed, but she’s also forced to bring her BFF into that nightmare. And neither is strong enough to survive it.

Not alone anyway. Not when Brian’s allure both sexually and medicinally gets them so addicted that they’ll do anything—including throw the other overboard—to maintain their supply. They’ll weaponize that craving to let jealousy rule their every maneuver, tricking each other and Brian to take him for themselves. It shouldn’t be surprising, though, since Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte) is just as crazed. It’s a loony bin built upon narcissistic satisfaction.

I’m not well-versed in 60s and 70s Japanese cinema, so I must take Heimann’s word for the fact that he uses that visual style to tell his tale. I do see it, though, with the shifting aspect ratios, extreme camera angles, and pervasive Japanese touchstones whether language, weaponry, or botany. To me its homage supplies flourishes a la Kill Bill: Volume 1 … just much less overt. It adds to the comedy too with Pucci and Forte embellishing their actions in over-the-top ways.

We need that humor because the narrative itself gets very dark. I’m not talking about the Lovecraftian alien whose libido is so powerful that it risks exploding the heads of its human mates either. I mean the source of Joey and Craig’s trauma as well as the unfortunate epiphanies they conjure upon following through on their emotions to realize their love and compassion for the other can never outweigh the damage their codependency has otherwise wrought.

Gavaris lends some great comic relief thanks to his character always using jokes to mask his pain. We laugh with him in his attempts to not fall completely apart and laugh at Pucci and Forte for really leaning into the extremes of their respective characters’ demands (his immaturity and her entitlement). And all the while Dudley breaks our hearts as she desperately tries to not be a bad person despite constantly falling prey to her worst impulses.

But that’s the thing, right? Those impulses are as much a drug as narcotics, pharmaceuticals, and space slime. Craig’s insecurities leading him to need constant validation. Joey’s guilt and anger manifesting as self-loathing and resentment to lead her to give it to him and distract herself from her own. The emotionally parasitic cycle of relationships mirroring the actual parasitic cycle of an alien’s ambitions. The stranger things get, the more real the message becomes.

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[L-R] Jordan Gavaris as “Craig” and Olivia Taylor Dudley as “Joey” in the horror comedy, TOUCH ME, a Yellow Veil Pictures release. Photo Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.