Film Review: Touch

Touch
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
RVK Studios, Good Chaos
In Theaters 07.12 

We’re finally past the point of watching waves of movies that were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as movies that come with an inflated budget and behind-the-scenes baggage because they were made mid-pandemic. At last, we can finally settle into watching period pieces that are merely set during the early days of COVID. Touch manages to use this setting to great effect, playing off of the reality that for many of us, it was a period when time stood still, and building its story around a protagonist who doesn’t have the option of letting it do so.

In Reykjavik in early 2020, widower Kristófer (Icelandic singer and actor Egill Ólafsson) is diagnosed with early-stage dementia. After being advised by his doctors to settle his affairs, his mind jumps to the biggest one of his life. Kristófer closes down the restaurant he owns and heads to London.  As the film alternates between his present-day search and flashbacks of his life,  the audience is introduced to a younger Kristófer, played by Palmi Kormákur (the son of the film’s writer-director, Baltasar Kormákur), who is studying at the London School of Economics in the 1960s. An idealistic young socialist, Kristófer decides to leave his studies and finds himself walking into a Japanese restaurant. While Kristófer only asks the owner, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki, Departures, The Works and Days), to let him apply for a job in order to prove something to his skeptical school friends, he actually quits his studies and takes a job because of a desire to get close to Takahashi’s daughter, Miko (Kōki, Ox-Head Village). The two fall in love, though their relationship abruptly ends when the restaurant closes down and Miko disappears. In 2020, Kristófer sets out to track down his lost love while he still remembers her, and he’s not going to let a global pandemic or anything else stand in his way. 

Baltasar Kormákur’s prolific filmography ranges from Icelandic language films, including 101 Reykjavík and The Sea to mainstream Hollywood fair including 2 Guns, Everest and Adrift. While Touch is the sort of character based film that’s likely to play predominantly in arthouses, and alternates between Icelandic, English and Japanese languages, it’s a smartly paced and thoroughly involving film that has crossover potential. Despite a modest budget, it plays with the fluidity and self assurance of a Hollywood production made by a seasoned veteran, and Kormákur has a strong handle of the emotional weight of the material. A year after Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer exploded in cinemas worldwide, Touch deals with the lasting psychological and emotional effects that of the atomic bomb on Japanese citizens, and on the culture, in thoughtful and heartbreaking ways that were outside the scope of Nolan’s story, yet are very welcome to see portrayed with sensitivity and insight. 

Ólafsson is marvelous in his low-key portrayal of man haunted by his past while trying desperately to hold on to it, as well as to seize every moment of the present. The younger Kormákur is natural and charming, and Kōki, a well-known Japanese model and songwriter, is utterly captivating as Miko. A romantic story lives and dies based on whether the characters are likable and engaging, and these wonderfully natural actors make it easy to fall in love with both Kristófer and Miko. Yoko Narahashi (The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha) is enchanting as the older Miko, and the scenes she shares with Ólafsson are tender and moving.

Touch is a beautifully crafted character study about making every moment count, and about having the courage to communicate your deepest fears and feelings. It’s an intoxicating experience that kept me transfixed throughout, and if Kristófer can traverse the globe at a perilous time for the experience, I certainly think that audiences should be able to make the trip to the theater and invest two hours in this thoughtful, mesmerizing and deeply satisfying film. –Patrick Gibbs

Read more reviews of international films:
Film Review: Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
Film Review: Evil Does Not Exist