‘Touch’ Review: Memory, Mystery and Lost Love Remind Us What It Is to Be Human

Seventy-one is as good a time as any for your first tattoo. Or so figures the soft-spoken and deliberate Kristófer, a widower visiting London from his home in Reykjavik in March of 2020. Played as an older man by singer and actor Egill Ólafsson in Touch, a new romantic drama from prolific Icelandic-born director Baltasar Kormákur, Kristófer is attempting to reconcile his past just as the world was about to get blindsided by the future and a pandemic that would claim more than 7 million lives worldwide. (The film’s evocation of those nascent days of the pandemic are both gently amusing and a little traumatic.)

The tattoo parlor sits in the same spot that once held Nippon, a long-ago shuttered Japanese restaurant where— for a few memorable months in 1969— Kristófer worked as a dishwasher, learned to make a traditional Japanese breakfast, and fell hopelessly in love with the proprietor’s daughter. After spotting the word pinned to the wall of the shop and still knowing a little Japanese, he picks the kanji for “courage” to be inked on his shoulder. (The tattooist thought the characters were Chinese.)

Given the film he is in, “nostalgia” would have also made a solid choice. As Touch’s animating force, wistfulness and regret threaten to overrun the movie, not unlike the rampaging nature in the survival thrillers that Kormáku—the guiding hand behind 2022’s Beast, 2018’s Adrift and 2015’s Everest—has made his stock in trade.

However, Kormákur has a deft enough feel for film construction, pacing and camera technique that he never allows his movie to drown in the gauzy sentiment of soft memories. As a storyteller, Kormákur, adapting Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s 2022 book alongside the novelist himself, also has a keen understanding of the devastating truths that lurk below even our fondest recollections; in this case, those actualities are directly connected to one of the most horrific moments of the 20th century.  

Young Kristófer (played by the lanky and handsome newcomer Pálmi Kormákur, the director’s son) was an odd fit for the London School of Economics in 1969: a Nordic anarchist amongst well-heeled evangelists for capitalism. Much to the shock of his mildly racist schoolmates, he drops out to take a lowly position at a restaurant run by the stern Takahashi-san (an excellent Masahiro Motoki, star of the 2009 Best International Feature Oscar winner Departures), who seems enchanted by both the young man’s humility and his tales of fishing on the shores of his native Iceland. 

As brought to life by Kormákur and production designer Sunneva Ása Weisshappel, the restaurant, itself in the space of a former bakery, is a magical place to inhabit, both for the audience and Kristófer. His romance with Miko (the doe-eyed singer and model Kōki), is furtive at first, developed over glances and quick touches, before being finally and secretly consummated in his boarding house and at her family’s tenement flat. After Nippon is unceremoniously shutdown and Miko and her father disappear without warning, the heartbreak and mystery of what happened to them comes to quietly torment Kristófer over the next half century.

The understated acting and workmanlike direction keeps things just on the dry side of cute. As Kristófer the elder, Ólafsson, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s just before production began, brings a shattered bullishness to a man poking around the attic of regret. And while Pálmi Kormákur is not much of a physical match for Ólafsson, he brings a zephyr-like forbearance that perfectly vibes with the calm, unassuming nature of his father’s film. 

The older Kristófer is compelled to take on his mission of reconciling his past at such an inconvenient historic moment because it marks his last chance: an MRI has just recently indicated the early signs of dementia. As baby boomers age, the number of Alzheimer’s and dementia sufferers is likely to double over the next 25 years, and it is poised to become the defining ailment of our time. Touch is an inspired and necessary reminder that within that space, there are such a huge variety of stories to tell beyond “dad lost his car keys.”

It is a difficult and painful subject to consider, talk about, and confront both in life and in the movies. But Kormákur’s quiet little film reminds us that when we do—and however we do it—the process can remind us what it is like to be human.