The characters’ description of being suddenly freed from all anxiety is exactly what happened to me one dark night in a dorm in ’91. Suddenly, everything that bothers you all the time about your life disappears into a warm glow. Instead of being f****d up, you feel more functional than you ever have. Heimann shows how much this means to the leads, focusing on the emotional pain they are shackled with every step they take. Then is shown how much they miss that release when it has faded, as well as what they would do in order to get more. This allows the audience to feel the unavoidable horror that always follows you down the path of addiction like a carnivorous shadow. That it comes in the form of a slick bisexual extraterrestrial is the icing on the shaft of the simile.
“The heroin metaphor in Touch Me is blatant as opposed to whispered…”
What has Touch Me hovering above many other pictures is how it marches to the beat of its own heroin addicted drummer. There are a lot of moves here that are highly unusual, like putting the entire first act and set up into a nine-minute monologue, delivered in one shot with no cuts, while slowly closing in. It shouldn’t work, but it does; it works even better than you can comprehend. While on the heroin haunted house ride, Heimann treats his audience to a party of snappy lines flying everywhere. Touch Me has the same power of eclectic conversations to be enjoyed as Sexy Beast and Pulp Fiction. What makes the smart dialogue so extra delicious here is the high levels of bitchiness, zinging up the exchanges, letting them be sprinkled with queer Tajin.
Like many other drug movies, Touch Me is a great movie to get high to, meaning marijuana, of course. The amazing cinematography by Dustin Spencheck will make your eyelids quiver. The visuals utilize a method of seemingly contradictory elements that could be called ornate minimalism. Areas of solid darkness lit by slivers of neon sent me into an appreciation k-hole from which there was no escape. Even the touches of rubber monster FX seem weirdly perfect when they appear. Touch Me is worthy of the same regard as the great hard drug classics like Trainspotting and Requiem For A Dream. In fact, Touch Me is the new heroin beacon shining high on the arthouse hill.
"…the new heroin beacon shining high on the art house hill."
