Touch Me (USA 2025: Dir Addison Heimann)

If the creators of The Mighty Boosh had bonded over lunch with Frank Henenlotter (I'll leave you to work out the details of that one) Touch Me may have been the result.

"I fucked an alien, an alien named Brian", confesses anxiety filled Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) to her therapist, in the middle of recounting a bizarre and not altogether safe sexual experience. Joey encounters the track suited, impressively coiffed and potentially planet saving intergalactic visitor while on a catering gig (Lou Taylor Pucci). One touch of his glowing finger relieves her of her inner fears, and the resultant drunken sex with tentacles, although not consensual, is life changing.

Joey's description of the event as a sort of "hentai porn" experience is a pretty good description for the majority of Heimann's decidedly odd sophomore feature. To flee her weird and borderline dangerous encounter, Joey retreats to the safety of the home she shares with gay Craig (Jordan Gavaris); their slacker shtick is one of the highlights of the film.

But that safety is short lived; when their shower backs up with horseshit leaving them unable to afford the plumbing fees, 'Brian' enters the scene again when Joey accepts an invitation to his weekend retreat, bringing Craig with her. In between bouts of hip hop workouts with his assistant, Laura (Marlene Forte), 'Brian' seduces both flatmates; but his promises of a solution to earthly climate change mask a sinister, and more deadly purpose.

That Touch Me's executive producers include those purveyors of the headscratchy, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, is a thumbs up for the combination of humour and absurdity that abounds in Heimann's film, which takes a whacked out look at addiction (chemical and emotional), self help and friendship without ever becoming self consciously quirky. Dudley and Gavaris are excellent as the two vaguely millennial friends - I could have watched a movie starring just the two of them - and Pucci's Brian is splendidly polymorphously perverse. If this was filmed twenty years ago it would definitely have been more explicit (the credited Intimacy Coordinator is a sign of the times) and because of this at times I felt that Touch Me held back a little. But it's a funny, inventive movie with enough quirks and ticks to maintain interest.

Touch Me is available on digital download from 4th May.

Synchronic (USA 2019: Dir Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead)

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's previous three features have all foregrounded believable sympathetic characters encountering horrific, mysterious or sci fi infused scenarios, and in many ways Synchronic, their latest movie, is no different. 

We're in New Orleans, and two emergency services recovery workers, Dennis (Anthony Mackie) and his friend Steve (Jamie Dornan) are on hand to clean up when things get messy. Steve reckons that the pair only get to see a small proportion of total deaths in the city - the sudden ones - and that there's infinite possibilities before one karks it, indicating that the future isn't set.

Dennis has a wife, Tara (Katie Asleton) and an 18 year old daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides), with whom he finds difficulty communicating; she's failing at school and can't see the point of her education. Steve, as a man without commitments and a seemingly younger outlook, has no such problems in being able to talk to the restless girl.

In the course of their day to day duties, the pair come across some weird emergencies: a woman in a hotel room bitten by a rare snake; a guy who falls into a lift shaft and is mysteriously dismembered; a corpse run through with a medieval sword; a body, burnt to a crisp, with no other signs of fire; and a drugged out flop house with the words 'time is a lie' written on the wall. The connection between these incidents is a packet found at each scene, which contains a drug in pill form called 'Synchronic'. We've already seen first hand that the drug induces strong hallucinations, taking the user out of their body and apparently transporting themselves elsewhere in time.

Well there's no 'apparently' about it; that's exactly what the drug does. Ostensibly a legal high, for those who can vibe off its powers, mainly the young, 'Synchronic' is literally a time travelling pill. When Steve is exposed to a needle on one of his pickups, a routine blood test leads to some terrible news; he has a progressive cancer and a poor prognosis. He fails to tell Dennis, who nevertheless notices that his partner is drinking heavily and popping a lot of painkillers. Shocked by what the drug is doing to the community, Steve goes to the source - a downtown vape/legal high shop - and buys up the supply. Faced with an uncertain future, Steve tries the drug himself, the extent of the reaction to which depends on the state of the user's pineal gland; Steve's condition results in his gland remaining youthful (it calcifies with age apparently), and so he's able to experience the full 'Synchronic' effect, which literally lurches him out of one time to another.

But when Brianna, who also takes the drug while at a party, goes missing somewhere in time, Dennis and Tara fall apart; it's left to Steve, using what's left of the drug, to leap into time to try and find her.

Characteristically for the directors Synchronic isn't really about one thing, which has left some sci fi fans feeling short-changed. The movie uses the properties of the drug to ask questions about friendship, time, history and memory, rather than a tricksier approach that might have been taken by, for example, Christopher Nolan. Steve seems a doomed individual even before the diagnosis; a frequent dream about coffins sliding about in a storm leads to an awful family revelation which overshadows his life and possibly accounts for his itinerant existence. The limited lifespan available to him actually focuses his mind on what's important.

Some of the science of the drug nods in the direction of the HG Wells novella 'The Time Machine': the drug allows the user to go back seven minutes, but dependent on where they are they can be displaced to different points in time, a little like a needle jumping tracks on vinyl (allowing for some wild scenes including Conquistadors and KKK members); as a man of colour, this nearly always works out badly for Steve. The idea of looping time was effectively utilised in the pair's last movie, The Endless (2018), but the emotional core here is much stronger, while the mind bending-ness of the whole thing, and its take on randomness, chance and luck edges nearer to chaos theory than anything cinematic. 

But while the themes in Synchronic are a heady brew, Benson and Moorhead's trademark humour shines through, often unexpectedly; "You might see James Bond, but I experience Charlie Sheen" comments Steve at one point, in the middle of a dark conversation following the revelation about his cancer.

I fully get that some people won't like this movie. It restlessly never settles in any one direction, but the playfulness of the thing never gets in the way of the bigger themes it's offering up. Funny, thought provoking and damned sad, it's a film which offers some redemption but under a decidedly existential stormcloud.

Synchronic has its VOD UK premiere on 29th January 2021.

The Endless (USA 2017: Dir Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s follow up to their excellent 2014 romance-with-tentacles movie Spring is a real melon twister of the highest order.

Benson and Moorhead both star (casting themselves using their own first names) as brothers, who ten years previously had escaped from a woodland deity worshipping cult. The group had adopted the pair from infancy, rescuing them from a car crash near the commune which killed their mother.

But returning to normal life has clearly been difficult. When we first meet them, Justin and Aaron are both stuck in menial cleaning jobs, living a real second gear existence. But a strange package delivered to their home, containing an old video tape featuring one of the cult - Anna - seeming to address them personally, sets off a desire (by Aaron at least) to return to the commune. Grudgingly Justin agrees to accompany him. 

When the brothers arrive at the so called ‘Camp Arcadia’ they find the cult members no older than when they last saw them. The group are also preparing for an ‘Ascension’ which presumably will find the commune members reborn. Justin remains sceptical but Aaron is quickly seduced back into the cult's strange ways and rituals, forming an attachment with Anna, now broadly the same age, who raised him from a baby.

As usual to tell more of the plot would be to spoil the fun, suffice it to say that we’re in Triangle, Time Crimes and Primer territory here. And while all those films are good in their own ways, what makes The Endless such a terrific movie is the balance of ‘oh wow’ moments with a rich vein of dry humour which not only adds to the suspension of disbelief needed to accept the movie’s plot, but makes Benson (who wrote the script) and Moorhead (also Director of Photography on the flick) a really enjoyable duo to spend time with.

Other supporting characters are also well-defined, particularly the inscrutable cult leader Hal (Tate Ellington) and there's a fine turn from James Jordan as the brilliantly named and creatively angry Shitty Carl - intriguingly some of these characters return from Benson and Morehead's debut feature, 2012's Resolution, suggesting that the cycles in which the cast of this movie operate may exceed the confines of the film. The Endless builds quietly from its linear opening, and tells its story with some care while opening out the drama, resisting the urge to be overly tricksy and maintaining wit and humanity: the ending packs such a punch because the preceding hour and a half has been structured so well.

One of my favourite films of the year so far. See it.