
Addison Heimann’s gloriously inventive Touch Me is one of the strangest movies ever accepted at Sundance: It’s a hypnotic bisexual thriller about co-dependent best friends and roommates (Olivia Taylor Dudley and Jordan Gavaris), enthralled by an alien posing as a hot, track-suited, hip-hop dance fanatic (Lou Taylor Pucci) who hooks them with the healing but addictive power of tentacle sex.
After years of well-made and well-intentioned but rather safe Sundance films, the prestigious festival’s selection of Touch Me feels like a step into a wilder, riskier, more fun kind of cinema. Heimann, who broke out with the mental-health horror film Hypochondriac, wondered himself if Touch Me would be too weird for Park City, though he notes that his film may be part of a trend.
“Last year they programmed a movie about a satellite and a buoy falling in love,” he says. “And this year there’s a film where a woman becomes a chair. Maybe Sundance is just getting weirder and weirder.”
Touch Me premieres Tuesday, and is up for sale. MovieMaker talked with Heimann about hip-hop dance, mental health, and the influences on Touch Me — including Paul Schrader and hentai, a highly sexualized subgenre of Japanese anime.
Tim Molloy: Can you talk about the use of music in this film, especially the recurring, boom-boom-boom–boom song that accompanies the dance numbers? I’ve done a lot of searching and can’t find it anywhere.
Addison Heiman: That’s a song — or at least the bass beat — by El-P of Run the Jewels. I wanted kind an homage to Ex Machina, but I wanted it to be something that essentially would be stuck in your head. When El-P sent it to us… there were supposed to be lyrics. It’s an unreleased song from his latest album. Now it’s been just stuck in our heads for the entire time.
Tim Molloy: Can you talk about the Japanese influences on the film? Jordan Gavaris’ character, Craig, is trying to learn Japanese from an app, but it goes beyond that.
Addison Heimann: I’ve been a fan of Japanese cinema since I was a kid, growing up with Studio Ghibli films. As I got older I started learning Japanese — which started as a pandemic dare by my roommate, who told me I’d never be able to learn it. I was like, ‘Well, I guess now I have to.’ It turned into, ‘I do two things: I make films, and I learn Japanese.’
When creating the look of the movie, I was trying to figure out how I wanted to execute this. Obviously, the story about the alien tentacle monster initially has influences from Japanese hentai films, and the pink films.
Tim Molloy: I don’t know what those are.
Addison Heimann: Pink films are like exploitation films of the ’60s and ’70s. There are two different types. There’s like the really depraved kind, and there’s also kind of like rape-revenge, female-oriented pictures like Lady Snowblood, which was a big influence on Kill Bill, and Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion. But I didn’t just pull from pink films. I pulled from the entirety of the Japanese oeuvre.
But the biggest influence is Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a Paul Schrader film from the ’80s. That was my biggest influence for creating the alien world. How much do you know about Mishima?
Tim Molloy: I love Paul Schrader but I’ve never seen it.
Addison Heimann: Mishima is is about an infamous, infamous, gay fascist writer of the 20th century who wanted to make a return to the time when the Emperor was seen as God, because he thought that Western influences were overtaking the culture. So he took over a military base and tried to convince them to return to that time. And they all laughed at him, and he committed seppuku right in front of them.
And so Paul Schrader made this movie, essentially telling that story, but had these interstitial moments of four separate stories within the movie that take place entirely on theatrical sets. And so when I was creating kind of the alien world — what we call our Eden Room, which is the place where the tentacle sex happens — and the Cage Room, and then the Crystal Room, which is kind of the Japanese-style room with the shoji screens, I wanted them all to be done in this very theatrical setting that was an entire homage to the cinema of that time, like Jigoku and Kwaidan — and of course the big one is House.
I loved the saturated color, yet artifice of it all. No one was pretending we weren’t creating film. It’s a very theatrical style.
To make this movie on a budget… I just wanted it to be as practical as possible. So I took this beautifully styled Mishima influence and then started deep diving into the world of Japanese cinema, and discovered this kind of very specific style of how they did things… light changes, set changes. They’re in a room, and then the literal stage will shift, and then they’re in another room, lights go back, and we push into another room.
That was very interesting to me in terms of storytelling, and I wanted it to be this kind of like confluence. … That’s why the aspect ratio changes in Touch Me. We’re in this kind of old-school, Kabuki-style theatricality of of an alien world. We’re using theatrical language like light shifts and monosaturated color in different scenes, in order to kind of create the alien world as it were.
Addison Heimann on Touch Me, Hypochondriac, and Sex With Monsters
Tim Molloy: This is your second consecutive movie where someone has sex with a monster — there’s one scene of that in Hypochondriac, where the protagonist has sex with a wolf creature, and it’s very effective and very scary and also sort of funny in it’s audacity. Did you like the response that you got in Hypochondriac and want to sort of go in that direction, or was that just coincidental?
Addison Heimann: In terms of Hypochondriac, in that sex scene I think we got a myriad of responses. The reason I did that scene in Hypo is I just wanted to show this kind of eerie, very gay sex scene that showed a bunch of things about gay sex you just don’t normally see in cinema.
Tim Molloy: What things? How do you mean?
Addison Heimann: I think a lot of gay sex scenes are just like, “And we flip over and we enter and we move on.” I wanted to show an actual natural progression of a certain version of how gay people have actual real and authentic sex. And then, obviously, it gets crazier for there.
[Laughs.] Wow, sex with monsters. I haven’t even even thought about the reason that existed in terms of the connection. I think people just need to have more sex with monsters.
Tim Molloy: It’s funny you mentioned Schrader, because there’s a video where he talks about how in storytelling you have the real thing, and the metaphorical thing, and they have to come just close enough to spark, without quite touching. And sex with monsters struck me as a really good metaphor for addiction. And having relationships with people you shouldn’t, because they’re bad for you.
Addison Heimann: Oh yeah. That’s a huge part of it. The impetus of the creation of the movie stems around — honestly, you’ve seen Hypo. I made this whole movie where I was, like, “It gets better. You have to learn to live with your monster. It’s gonna be hard work, but you can move forward.” And then I hit another lull of mental illness, like right after.
I watched this movie called The Untamed, which is about people who have sex with this kind of omnipresent alien who can either destroy you or make you feel euphoria. … And I was like, ‘Oh, man. Wouldn’t it be great if you could f— something and just have all of your anxiety and depression go away?'”
Tim Molloy: You’ve also talked about being recently diagnosed with OCD. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to Neal Brennan’s Blocks podcast, where he talks with guests about their mental and emotional blocks. But one question he asks sometimes is whether there’s any upside to all these problems. For example, does OCD drive you to finish projects? Or is it just all negative?
Addison Heimann: That’s a good question. There’s a lot of downsides, but I think ultimately, where we find the benefits of something like mental illness is the benefit of empathy. … And it also benefits my artistic creation to get to understand characters. I think my favorite — or at least the most surprising, gratifying things I got when I made Hypochondriac — was the amount of community that I was able to foster based on people who would see the movie and say it made them feel less alone.
My entire modus operandi is to make films that explore mental illness in the genre space… that allows us to talk about things without actively and purposefully talking about things. Hypochondriac was like, “This is my story. This is my personal story. I need to show you what I’m going through.” And then Touch Me is more just like, “The metaphor is kind of there, but I also have tentacle sex and lots of jokes and lots of practical effects, like head decapitations, all this kind of wild stuff. …
The silver lining is getting to find other people who have the same or similar illnesses, and getting to kind of commiserate. It makes us feel less alone. I think ultimately, that’s what art does. And getting to create art like that, and getting to commiserate with other people in our shared experiences, is what I love doing.
Touch Me is a sales title at Sundance.
Main image: Olivia Taylor Dudley in Touch Me by Addison Heimann, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Dustin Supencheck.