TOUCH ME Review

Another week, another new horror release has hit my favorite streaming service, Shudder.

To be absolutely honest, Shudder has not been knocking it out of the park so far in 2026. So far of note, we have had Honey Bunch and Forbidden Fruits as outings that I quite enjoyed, and that was just about it. Well, I guess sMothered wasn't bad, either. But it's July as I write this, and they release, as I said, a new movie every week. Most of which I have watched! And most of which have been, frankly, unpleasant.

Offerings like Find Your Friends and Whistle and Night Patrol (among others) have left me very underwhelmed. I still love the service--it's given me access to hits from the past I have never seen before like The Burning--but its original content has not wowed me recently, and it's what I most look forward to.

Still, hope and faith spring eternal, and I endeavor to continue giving the service every opportunity to floor me with good material. As of this writing, I'm just a week away from Exit 8 hitting the streamer, and I have heard good things about that (even though the video game upon which it is based seems very much NOT my style; I'm not meticulous or patient enough to succeed at that puzzle game).

So it was when I opened the service this week and saw their newest offering, Touch Me. Admittedly, the quick summary did not fill me with much confidence: "Two codependent best friends become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist who may or may not be trying to take over the world".

It sounded a bit messy to me. Like maybe too much was going on or that it was going to be too emo or something; I can't put my finger on it, but I was very wary of this one based on that description.

Joey and Craig are our two codependent best friends noted above. Craig lives a lazy life off the funds he gets from his family. Joey leeches off of him and sees a therapist to get past her trauma. We find out from her therapy session that, until recently, she was seeing a man named Brian who she claims is an otherworldly creature who had the ability to take away her anxiety and maker feel better for periods of time.

When she bumps back into Brian while job-hunting, she is re-entangled in his life, only this time, due to a catastrophe at Craig's apartment, her bestie is brought into the chaos, as well. They both quickly fall for Brian's charms and his ability to soothe their pain with his magical touch.

But yeah, as the synopsis hints at: something darker might be going on here. Will Joey and Craig be able to see it past their own self-centered behaviors?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Touch Me is WEIRD, but in a very fun way. The direction takes some brave choices and gets very artistic with its presentation, but not in a pretentious way; more like a silly, big swing kind of way. There are pop-ups on the screen and changes in lighting; it's really toying with the viewer as it goes.

And the writing is enjoyably quirky and made me laugh. The characters are all genuinely terrible people, but you still don't actively dislike them. Their flaws make them somewhat endearing. This isn't like the aforementioned Find Your Friends where the protagonists were so awful I just wanted to see them fail; in Touch Me, they just seem somewhat realistically narcissistic.

I genuinely just had a good time with this flick. It's just... fun. 

+ The cast is all certainly game for this production, and they treat it like it's very serious material. Olivia Taylor Dudley, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Jordan Gavaris are all doing solid work here selling this story and creating a blast of an atmosphere while they are acting up a storm in this oversexualized alien drama. Paget Brewster is a good hand, too, but she has less to do than her costars. Overall, everyone is making this project better than it would be if they had cast actors who didn't "get" the material and commit to it. 

- The plot reveals are a bit confusing at the end when we start getting Brian's story and that of his alien nature. The characters in the movie, who seemed to be pretty big dopes, were picking up on things that I felt like I wasn't. I just felt like the details getting doled out were a bit out of nowhere and not entirely congruent with everything we saw. The movie even has Joey's psychiatrist call these out in the end, but that doesn't make it BETTER that the movie recognizes its own plot holes. 

- Touch Me is very much a "Not For Everyone" movie. A lot of folks are going to find this too weird or too horny or too confusing or too off-putting. It's a pretty steep asking price to get on board with this effort, and I can see a large chunk of the audience refusing to pay it. Not that every movie needs to be accessible to everyone, but it does make this a very difficult flick to say "I recommend this!" about. 

OVERALL

Okay, Shudder; I'll give you this one, too. If we count the 3.0-out-of-5 sMothered, too, then you are up to four hits on the year. Touch Me isn't phenomenal filmmaking or anything, but it is plenty of fun and decently creative. I liked what director Addison Heimann does to push the boundaries and make this effort stand out.

🍿 SCORE = 68 / 100