Touch Me Not

Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not has good intentions, but what this chilly study of intimacy is lacking is, ironically, intimacy

Film Review by Katie Goh | 12 Oct 2018
Film title: Touch Me Not
Director: Adina Pintilie
Starring: Laura Benson, Tómas Lemarquis, Christian Bayerlein, Grit Uhlemann, Adina Pintilie, Hanna Hofmann, Seani Love, Irmena Chichikova, Rainer Steffen, Georgi Naldzhiev, Dirk Lange, Annett Sawallisch
Release date: 19 Oct
Certificate: 18

Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not opens with a slow pan of a body, up a hairy limb to a flaccid penis and onwards. The opening shot sums up the jarring juxtaposition of Pintilie’s film: there’s confrontation yet, at the same time, a forced casualness.

A fictional documentary, Touch Me Not is an exploration of how bodies create intimacy. The film follows Laura (Benson), a middle-aged woman with intimacy issues. Unable to get close to anyone, she embarks on an odyssey of sexual healing, conducting interviews with people considered outside the sexual norm. There’s a touch therapist, a transgender sex worker, and a man with spinal muscular atrophy.

Touch Me Not’s provocative subject matter caused some raised eyebrows when it won 2018’s Berlinale, but for a film about intimacy, there’s nothing particularly shocking or radical happening. Interviews are conducted forensically, as if Pintilie is a scientist using Laura as her guinea pig. The film’s lack of warmth for its subjects is echoed stylistically with art-house blues-greys and coldly composed frames.

Pintilie’s film has nothing but good intentions – to hold up all sex as normal sex – but Touch Me Not’s coldness ironically blocks any intimacy between film and audience.


Released 19 Oct by MUBI; Certificate 18