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Sporting its Canadian premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival (“Fantasia”) after a robust festival run that included premiering in Sundance’s Midnight section, South by Southwest, Frameline, Overlook and Night Visions, Addison Heimann’s Touch Me (2025) offers up an incredible premise tempered by credible acting. Understood as a satirical reflection on the traumatic underpinnings of addiction, codependency, lust, toxic relationships, and body horror, I viewed Touch Me at about the same time that I caught James Gunn’s latest iteration of Superman (2025) and that chance collision provoked questions and insights.
Let’s talk frankly about intergalactic interspecies sex, shall we? Whereas miscegenation references sex between races, and interspecies mating refers to sex between Earthen species, there doesn’t appear to be a specific term for intercourse between humans and space aliens, though genre provides a means of imagining it. Which is exactly the response I got when I Googled it (yes, I Googled it). “There's no definitive scientific term for breeding between humans and hypothetical alien species because it's currently considered impossible and exists mostly within the realm of science fiction,” Google advises. So science fiction it is.
Whereas Candy Clark freaked out by the prospect when David Bowie attempted sex in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) and her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) can’t get enough of it in Touch Me. Can you blame them? Their alien tryst Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) dispenses a euphoric toxin to all those he touches that obliviates the psychological anxieties engendered by past trauma. Aware of his gift, Brian manipulates his human lovers with shifting offers of interspecies intercourse or—in the case of his assistant Laura (Marlene Forte)—its denial. The fact that sex with Brian is not only spectacular but tentacular assures that all three humans are trembling with lust. Why he’s being so polyamorous belies a sinister agenda.
Jump to Superman, restrained by pandering to general summer audiences with the palliative of intergalactic interspecies romance. Oh, brother. Not only has Gunn’s version of Superman and David Corenswet’s characterization been criticized for being too “woke”, but his saving of a squirrel was almost more than I could handle (admittedly, I hate squirrels and think they all should die insufferable deaths). My disgruntlement is only because we all know what has been on everyone’s minds since Superman’s strapping good looks and pronounced assets attracted Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). Presumably, the two are a number and I find it hard to believe that Lois could be satisfied with floating around mid-air with her Kryptonian exile. I mean, c’mon. Is she getting it good? Can she take it?
So kudos to Addison Heimann for pulling no punches and fantasizing not only on Joey and Craig being suspended in mid-air, intoxicated by the drug introduced into their bodies from Brian’s touch, and no doubt penetrated by those … endowed tentacles; but, even further, to discover (SPOILER ALERT) that it’s not Joey who can be impregnated by alien sperm (I’m presuming it’s sperm) but Craig, which—I don’t know—suggests what? The dangers of gay sex? I recommend you watch Touch Me on your own while I chance a cold shower.
Back to Google: “It's important to remember that for any actual interspecies breeding to occur, there would need to be a significant degree of biological compatibility between the two species. This is considered highly unlikely with genuinely alien life forms due to vast differences in genetics and evolutionary paths. In most fictional scenarios, any such breeding would likely be achieved through advanced genetic engineering rather than natural reproduction.”
Heimann eschews “genetic engineering” for bumping uglies and, again, I laud him for that. Otherwise we’d be languishing in the anemic romance of Superman. So before I take my cold shower, I’d like to touch for a moment (pun intended) on the character of Craig, a not-entirely-likeable trust fund slacker. Representation holds an inherent conundrum: you have to know enough about yourself and any group with which you identify in order to be able to represent yourself as a constituent of that group; and, often, how you come to know yourself is through the example, or the guidance, of that group’s representation. It’s something of a feedback loop: identity and representation.
Gay males of my generation, by example, were offered a feedback loop of evolving media to find ourselves, see ourselves, and identify ourselves writ large projected onto the silver screen or represented on the living room screen of television. Queer scholars much more accomplished than me have studied how television seems to be the first medium where challenges to representation are first addressed and where the nature of representation itself begins to evolve. Movies tend to follow suit much later, tending to be conservative mouthpieces for the status quo, being reluctant to hazard box office. So here we have Craig, impregnated by an alien (God-knows-how) and I seriously don’t quite know what I’m supposed to do with this risk of representation that Heimann has taken. Suffice it to say that I’m glad I’m in my elder years and exhausted with influences.
