We make space in our brains for lots of things these days: Instagram influencers and TikTok stars, series binge-watching, obsessive attention to the news cycle. Sometimes, in that endless reshuffling of attention-grabbers, we lose sight of essential pleasures that have served humankind ably for centuries. When we look at the movie landscape, in particular, almost nobody sighs and says, “I wish we had more romantic melodramas,” because we’ve nearly forgotten they’re even a genre. With Touch—adapted from the novel by Olaf Olafsson—Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur gives us the thing we didn’t know we wanted: a cross-cultural romance that spans decades, built around one man’s search for a long-lost love. This is a movie of gentle but resonant pleasures; it slows the world down, a little, for the span of time you’re watching it. And couldn’t we all use a little of that these days?
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Veteran Icelandic actor Egill Ólafsson plays Kristofer, an older man who’s had what could reasonably be called a happy life: He’s the owner of a seemingly successful seaside restaurant. His wife is now deceased, and there’s every indication that theirs was a good marriage. He has a stepdaughter who calls frequently to check up on him. But he’s recognizing that his time is limited, and there’s something he’s got to do. So he leaves his home in Iceland and travels first to London and then to Japan, in search of the woman—or at least news of the woman—who slipped out of his life many years earlier.
We see episodes from Kristofer’s past as he reflects on it: The younger Kristofer is played by Palmi Kormákur (the director’s son), an earnest beanpole of a kid who’s studying economics in 1970s London. He and his friends enjoy theoretical conversations about economic injustice; impulsively, Kristofer decides to quit school and join the proletariat. He charmingly if tentatively talks his way into a job washing dishes at a Japanese restaurant—the owner, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), takes a liking to him. Before long, Kristofer meets Takahashi-san’s bright, intriguing daughter, Miko (Kôki); he’s a goner even before she surveys his face and tells him that he reminds her of John Lennon. It takes a while for their romance to bloom—Miko already has a suitor, and other complications are gradually revealed—but once it does, there seems to be no separating them. Or so Kristofer believes, until one day Miko disappears.
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In old age, with nothing left to lose, Kristofer sets out to find Miko; the trail goes cold more than once. But there’s more to this story than the search for a lost love—because those stories are almost always mostly about the person who’s doing the searching. Touch is also about all that Kristofer doesn’t know about Miko and her father, circumstances that aren’t so much conventional secrets as bits of sorrowful history embedded in DNA. This is a love story where the ghosts of Hiroshima bear witness. Kristofer learns truths as an old man that he might not have been able to comprehend fully as a young one. Touch is about learning the necessary things at the right time—and sometimes even the last minute is the right time.
Yet this is in no way a jarring picture, or one that seeks to punish us with harsh truths. Maybe, more broadly, it’s a story about how we’re all required to live in our own time—memory offers only the briefest escape. As a director, Kormákur has made the loudest noise—in the United States, at least—as a director of action or adventure films, among them Contraband (2012), 2 Guns (2013), Everest (2015), and Beast (2022). But he’s just as skillful, and maybe even better, at this kind of filmmaking. He knows how to make the most of each setting. Iceland looks so mournfully beautiful you feel a little sad when Kristofer leaves it, but the London of the 1970s (and of the present day) holds just as much allure: Kristofer discovers that Takahashi-san’s restaurant is now a tattoo parlor, but he embraces its new identity rather than treating it as a sacrilegious invasion.
Kormákur and his cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson give a sense of the way, if we’re aware enough, glimmers of the past can permeate the present, as if shining through a translucent overlay. The mood of the film is wistful, a little sad, but ultimately quietly galvanizing, thanks in large part to the actors: Palmi Kormákur plays the young Kristofer as guileless but not clueless, feeling his way along as young people do. As the older Kristofer, Ólafsson recaptures some of that uncertainty: he’s an old man in surroundings that are no longer familiar, but he also realizes he has the chance to pick up the pieces of a mystery he’s lived with his entire life.
And as the older version of Miko, Yoko Narahashi has a kind of buoyant gravitas—as if the burdens she’s had to live with are lightened by the privilege and pleasure of just being able to breathe the air each day. Narahashi was also Kormákur’s casting director on the film. As she was reading lines with various performers, he realized that she was the only one for the role. Touch is the kind of movie you get when a filmmaker thinks like that, on his feet and with his heart—and in so doing, he makes us believe we can, too.