Touch (now on Peacock) is almost certainly the best film about the COVID era yet. Not that it’s a tense pandemic thriller, not at all – rather, it’s a time-hopping romance about an ill, aging man who travels across the world during the early days of social distancing and mask-wearing, to seek out a past love. Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur significantly shifts gears and tones from much of his previous work (Beast, Adrift, 2 Guns among them) to adapt the 2022 novel of the same title by Olafur Johann Olafsson. The result is a beautiful, absorbing drama for adults.
The Gist: Kristofer (Egill Olaffson) is trapped. It’s March, 2020. COVID is spreading. His doctor tells him dementia is pending. Now’s the time to take care of any personal affairs. He closes up his restaurant indefinitely and goes home and flops on the bed and… yearns. He yearns. “Forgive me,” he says to a photo of his late wife and he gets on a plane and flies from his home in Iceland to London, as his daughter frets on the phone about his health and traveling during a budding pandemic. Shutdowns loom – of his memory, of global social activity. Time. It’s tight.
Fifty-one years earlier. Young Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur) is a student in London who impulsively quits college and gets a job washing dishes in a Japanese restaurant. Wait, let’s back up – before he quits, he sets foot in the eatery for the first time to inquire about employment, and sees Miko (Koki) in passing and meets her eye and sees her smile and in that precise moment he changes his life. He says he’s communist but secretly believes he’s more of an anarchist, and ditching the conservatives at university and working for a wage is an extension of that ideology. But, well, when it comes right down to it, he did it for a girl.
The gamble pays off, but it doesn’t. You know that. The wife in the photo is definitely not Miko. We jump between 2020 and 1969, seeing Kristoffer’s yearning and searching in the former period, and his sweet, tender love story in the latter – with the occasional glimpse into a middle era with Kristofer’s wife Inga (Maria Ellingsen). Shy young Kristofer ingratiates himself to Miko’s father Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), the restaurateur, and the other employees by learning Japanese and generally being his own thoughtful self. He’s patient as Miko’s boyfriend drops out of the picture – Takahashi-san didn’t approve, and although Takahashi’s a good man, he may not be a good father. Then Kristofer simply stands by, allowing his and Miko’s mutual interest to bloom.
Meanwhile, the elder Kristofer doesn’t experience any overwrought Movie Drama. No, he just navigates an increasingly deserted London and imposes as gently as he can upon the hotelier, since he’s the absolute last guest before they shut down. He meanders a bit in an increasingly empty city, sleuthing where Miko could be these days. We learn what happened then and what happens now, and as it all happens in front of us our hearts grow, full of blood and life and love and hope.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you pair Touch with the thematically similar Past Lives, you may need to keep the tissues handy.
Performance Worth Watching: Excellent performances abound here: Kormakur’s shy, pensive characterization is a terrific foil for Koki’s alluring confidence, and we relish the moments they share together. And as the film’s emotional anchor, Olafsson blends notes of eccentricity, personal drive, intellect and instinct into a rich and satisfying fine wine of a performance.
Memorable Dialogue: Miko to Kristofer: “You remind me of him. Lennon.”
Sex and Skin: Two tender (but still kinda hot) sex scenes that straddle the R/PG-13 border.
Our Take: The complex narrative construction of Touch belies its pure, simple message about love and a need for closure. Perhaps a more pragmatic film would be a lesson in frustration, because the odds are stacked against Kristofer achieving his goal of reconnection. But this is a romantic film, not just in the love-story sense, but as in romanticism; its primary fuel is hope. Spending two hours with its optimistic protagonist and his earnest sentimentality is an affirming experience, and Kormakur strikes the perfect tone, blending wistful nostalgia and bittersweetness with a level of idealism that never feels manufactured or unnatural.
It’s also a shrewd, smartly conceptualized story with understated literary flourishes. Kristofer is a man caught between constructs of time – the rock of memory loss and the hard place of pending COVID isolation. This is where the single-word title shimmers with poignancy, since the elementary act of one human being touching another is quickly becoming not just taboo, but potentially dangerous. Co-writing the screenplay, Olafsson and Kormakur craft a quietly profound treatise about love and how it evolves, exploring, comparing and contrasting ideas about youthful attraction (and, to a somewhat cautious degree, lust) with the depth of affection that arrives with maturity.
The film also takes the time to let Kristofer appreciate his surroundings – he meanders through London, he gets inked at the tattoo shop that now exists in the former Japanese restaurant, he randomly meets a fellow widower at a bar and does karaoke with him – in a joyous manner, despite the weight of the circumstances. It ruminates on the notions of generational trauma and social strife without forcing them in or stepping on a soapbox; they’re just part of the fabric of life. All of the film’s thoughtful intricacies and incisive observations about the nature of society bubble in the subtext of a straightforward idea: Connection is powerful and essential to the human experience. Reconnection too.
Our Call: Touch is an absorbing, touching and simply lovely drama. And one of the year’s best? Yeah, maybe. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.