‘Touch’: A Man Tries to Find His First Love, 50 Years Later

The Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur has been assembling an unusually compelling career as a Hollywood journeyman. He made a couple of Mark Wahlberg vehicles (Contraband and the Denzel Washington buddy comedy 2 Guns) before pivoting to the natural disaster space, where movies from Everest to Adrift to Beast have merged a certain grown-up, character-based sensibility with the élan of pulpy showmanship.

Beast, for example, is a lion-attack thriller featuring a number of unobtrusively single-take sequences. (In between these American movies, he directed and starred in Iceland’s most popular release of 2016, playing a dad who tries to disappear his daughter’s troublesome boyfriend. In other words, he may have fashioned himself his own Liam Neeson vehicle.)

Touch, his new Icelandic project, is less formally ambitious and more narratively complex. Based on a novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, who co-authored the adaptation with Kormákur, Touch cuts back and forth between an older man named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) and his younger self (Palmi Kormakur). In 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to shut down the world, Kristófer sets off in search of an “old friend,” who, we see in the flashback sections set 50 years earlier, is his ex, Miko (Kōki). They meet in London when Kristófer, disillusioned with his studies, gets a job at the Japanese restaurant owned by Miko’s father. The movie generates a bittersweet suspense over how, exactly, the pair’s slow-burning romance will be cut short, and whether 2020 Kristófer will find Miko again.

The COVID angle, like the movie’s generally elegiac quality, is a vivid part of the film that Kormákur nonetheless doesn’t seem sure what to do with. (Maybe it makes more sense on the page.) The emerging pandemic certainly gives Kristófer a logistical challenge—nearly every hotel he stays in on the journey from Iceland to London to Hiroshima is on the verge of shutting down completely—as well as a theoretical ghostliness that matches his lost-love yearning.

Yet the actual scenes involving COVID-19 are largely workmanlike, consisting of Kristófer futzing with his mask and generally annoying a bunch of poor service workers who may be in fear for their lives. That the movie doesn’t play any of this behavior as particularly provocative (or even darkly funny) makes Kristófer’s trip feel vaguely passive-aggressive, reducing a global pandemic to one more modern inconvenience for a man on a shuffling mission. Better to mine it for tasteless dark humor than this muddled version of recent history.

The flashback scenes are, on the whole, more engaging, but they aren’t quite enough for a feature of their own, at least not in this form. They depend too much on the long wait for the inevitable exposition dump that will fill in the details of Miko’s disappearance from Kristófer’s life. When that scene comes, the details eel too transparently melodramatic for the desired—nay, expected!—tear-jerking, and it’s accompanied by a lack of discipline in Kormákur’s perspective: A few moments from Miko’s point of view join a random flashback to Kristófer somewhere in the intervening years between the two timelines, creating under-dramatized scenes that feel like shortcuts for what the movie couldn’t fit into its focal points. (Again, maybe the book has more of this material to round it out.)

The cross-cultural period romance of Touch is appealingly earnest and admirably open-ended, and it certainly makes a case for Kormákur’s versatility, given that his last movie featured Idris Elba punching a lion. But it ultimately falls prey to a common problem in time-gap love stories: It makes the vast gulf between parting and meeting again feel not just bridgeable, but soapily inconsequential.