It’s hard to believe that a movie as wild as “Touch Me,” premiering Tuesday as part of Sundance’s Midnight slate, could be autobiographical. After all, a quick logline — two friends grow addicted to the heroin-esque touch of an alien and end up in a throuple with him — doesn’t even scratch at the surface of the genre-bending horror-comedy. Yet the film is quite personal to writer-director Addison Heimann.
“The movie is based on my life,” he says. “I was going through a pretty devastating friendship breakup at the time of the inception of this movie, and I think it’s something that we don’t expect to take so much out of you in the way that romantic relationships take you through.”
From there, the characters of Craig (Jordan Gavaris) and Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) — a stand-in for Heimann and his ex-BFF, respectively — were born. The co-dependent pair doesn’t necessarily push each other to be their best selves, something Heimann was familiar with.
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“When I was going through it, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s her fault, and I’m gonna explore this as if it’s my fault,’” he says. “Craig is me, but all the self-loathing side of me. Having obsessive-compulsive disorder, I’m obsessed with the idea of ‘being good,’ and ‘being bad’ is the worst thing you could do. That’s how co-dependent friendships get born. The thing you’re not supposed to do with OCD is seek reassurance from others. The more reassurance you seek, the less it works, and the more anxious you get. So that’s essentially Craig’s modus operandi. All he wants is to be reassured that he’s a good person. So I took these two characters and I put them in this world where there’s an alien who’s that guy we all know that sucks you in and makes everything worse.”
For that character, Heimann was inspired after watching the 2016 Mexican film “The Untamed,” in which people experience sexual euphoria with an alien. He was fascinated by the idea, specifically of how that euphoria could manage the thoughts and symptoms of his OCD. From there sprung Brian, played by Lou Taylor Pucci, an alien who looks like a new-age guru in a tracksuit, and, depending on the scene, can be naive, manipulative, aloof, romantic, cruel and even self-pitying.
“I think Brian is the most difficult character to play,” Heimann says. “Joey and Craig are very human and very grounded, but that alien to be played in 18 different ways. Ultimately, I think Lou and I concluded that it was ultimately childlike but honest. And that’s the thing about narcissists.”
To write the film, Heimann blended those ideas alongside many nods to Japanese cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, like 1973’s “Lady Snowblood” and “Sex & Fury.” Also included are several hot-and-heavy tentacle sex scenes as Brian leaves his human form, which American audiences may not be accustomed to in live-action fare. But Heimann had a vision for stylizing these scenes, which he was able to create dynamically on an indie budget.
“We put a lot of money into practical effects because we knew those needed to look good,” he says. “Also, I deliberately wanted them to look stylistically practical, so when we came to the visual effects, we didn’t have to create a moving thing. The alien is a two-foot puppet that we comped in, but creatively that’s just the vibe. If you’re going to make a movie about alien sex, you want to have the alien be real, tangible and act, to be able to see things being touched and lifted and floating in the air. By both being pragmatic and also taking that stylistic swing, we were able to keep the budget down.”
Beyond the eroticism and nods to classic Japanese cinema, “Touch Me” also includes another unexpected delight: Several ’80s hip-hop-inspired dance numbers. Dance is an obsession of Brian’s, and Heimann says it reveals even more about him and his place in this throuple.
“It’s the idea of what an alien would think a human is like,” he says. “The way he talks is very weird and formal. He wears tracksuits. He does hip-hop dance. It’s almost like he watched MTV in the ’80s and took that as his whole personality. That was the genesis of the character, so he’s both a representative version of heroin or Xanax or alcohol, and an amalgamation of experiences me and my castmates have had with toxic narcissists.”
After building a world with so much creativity and chaos, Heimann says that, with the project done, he’s able to have a uniquely human understanding of the imploding friendship that sparked the idea of the film.
“I deliberately wrote this movie under the guise of exploring it from her perspective as if it was my fault. I think ultimately the answer is it’s no one’s fault and it’s everybody’s fault,” he says. “People are people and they make mistakes and it doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad or good … just people. I don’t have any ill will. There’s no hatred. We are fine— Not in the sense that we’re close friends, but we’re fine. It exists in the ether of: There’s a time in your life where we were each other’s everything, and we weren’t anymore, and that’s painful, but that pain is valid, and that is OK. We can still move forward and there’s not a bad person involved. It just happened.”
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