Touch Me Not | Telescope Film
Touch Me Not

Touch Me Not

Critic Rating

(read reviews)

User Rating

  • Romania,
  • Germany,
  • Czech Republic,
  • Bulgaria,
  • France
  • 2018
  • · 125m

Director Adina Pintilie
Cast Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Irmena Chichikova, Grit Uhlemann, Adina Pintilie
Genre Drama

On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free.

Stream Touch Me Not

What are critics saying?

90

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

Though not every moment is fascinating to watch, most moments are, and adult audiences should find its frank presentation of the diversity of intimacy thought-provoking and possibly therapeutic.

80

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.

75

Slant Magazine by Pat Brown

Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.

75

The Playlist by Jessica Kiang

Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.

75

The Film Stage by Ed Frankl

The surprise winner of the Berlinale’s Golden Bear is a film not easily summed up in an elevator pitch. It is, however, a studious, intelligent, if flawed and scattershot, work with an open mind about modern sexuality and intimacy. That open mind will need to be replicated in the audience too.

70

Variety by Jay Weissberg

Pintilie is the opposite of a misanthrope — she’s genuinely invested in opening the mind to the body’s sensations. Keeping it all balanced is where she gets bogged down.

70

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

Pintilie has a way of nudging the strangeness of her fiction/documentary hybridization so that your engagement isn’t predicated on narrative catharsis, but simply a desire for the continued frankness of it all.

63

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

60

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

The film does praiseworthy work when it comes to challenging accepted assumptions about what constitutes beauty and sexuality. It does so, however, through a degree of physical and emotional oversharing which some audiences will find deeply off-putting.

60

Screen International by Wendy Ide

The film does praiseworthy work when it comes to challenging accepted assumptions about what constitutes beauty and sexuality. It does so, however, through a degree of physical and emotional oversharing which some audiences will find deeply off-putting.

60

Film Threat by Bradley Gibson

Featuring a mix of fiction and real life, Touch Me Not explores intimacy in an experimental feature film that manages to make sex seem unlikely and tiresome.

58

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.

40

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

People will want to make their own minds up about the film, but for me there is something worryingly crass and naive in it.