‘Touch’ review: An Icelandic widower searches for lost love in a sensitive portrait of the early days of COVID-19

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it can still be difficult to understand what the historical fulcrum of February and March 2020 was. ” gradually rose before turning into a roar overnight. When our biggest concerns were the postponement of NBA games and Tom Hanks’ inability to finish “Elvis,” it was unthinkable that humanity was on the brink of a pandemic that claimed seven million lives and shattered many of the social norms that I support the polite society we had. long taken for granted. Most of us had no idea what was coming, so we wore our masks on half-empty flights as the world quietly prepared to close in around us.

Against this backdrop of uncertainty, Kristofer (Egill Ólafsson), an elderly Icelandic widower in Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch, receives the news no one ever wants. While his dementia is still in its early stages, one doctor makes it abundantly clear that he is down to the last grains of sand in his hourglass. With his mental faculties set to collapse in the coming months, he is advised to settle any unfinished business or looming presidential campaigns and find a way to make peace with the life he has lived. Sensing that his world is about to close in more ways than one, Kristofer ignores his stepdaughter’s pleas to shelter in place and heads to London for one last trip down memory lane.

The rest of the film unfolds in a bifurcated fashion, switching between the elder Kristofer’s journey and flashbacks to his youth. Young Kristofer (Pálmi Kormákur) was once a student at the London School of Economics, but gradually discovered that his radical Marxist views were incompatible with attending an elite business institution. While his leftist friends are content to complain about the exploitation of workers from the comfort of pubs and libraries before lucrative careers, Kristofer makes the spontaneous decision to drop out of school and take a job as a machinist washing dishes in a Japanese restaurant. He gradually immerses himself in Japanese culture and falls in love with the owner’s daughter, Miko (Kōki Kimura), finding a kinship with his new chosen family that his old social circles never offered him. But when the family closes the restaurant and abandons him without warning, he is devastated beyond recovery.

The lack of closure leaves a void in Kristofer’s heart that his subsequent marriage in Iceland never fills, prompting him to retrace his steps on a scavenger hunt to find the love of his life one last time. The Japanese restaurant has since been converted into a tattoo parlor, but a search through city records eventually leads to a shipping address for Miko in Japan. As global society continues to shrink, he hops on one of the last flights to Tokyo in hopes of catching one last glimpse of the life that has slipped through his fingers.

It’s not hard to see why there hasn’t been an immediate influx of great movies about the COVID-19 pandemic. An era defined by inactivity and staring at screens hardly lends itself to moving image art, and neither artists nor audiences are far enough away to really study it with detachment. But Kormákur uses the era beautifully to his advantage in “Touch.” Watching Kristofer wander through a rapidly emptying world heightens the sense that his memories are disappearing in real time. The free streets of London and Tokyo could just as easily be the corners of his mind that he has avoided visiting for decades. The dramatic irony that naturally comes from having lived through the pandemic makes it impossible not to root for this man to end his story on his own terms.

Much of the film’s beauty lies in Kristofer’s health as a character. Even as a dying man whose life did not go according to plan, he is driven not by bitterness or regret, but by the simple desire to find the woman he never stopped loving. The cruelty of nature might have made him the ultimate unreliable narrator, but Ólafsson embodies the character with so much empathy and curiosity that it’s easy to get wrapped up in the narrative tapestry he weaves from the fragments of his own memories. The result is a film whose elegance is all the more stunning for coming from the man who directed “2 Guns” and “Beast.”

Spanning 50 years and across multiple continents, never shifting its focus from the universal human desire to reflect on what might have been, “Touching” is an ode to accepting your life story without losing sleep over cause of things you could not change. Even though Kristofer and Miko were victims of circumstances beyond their control, sometimes it’s all you can do to pick up a pen and write the last sentence yourself.

Grade A-

A Focus Features release, “Touch” opens in theaters on Friday, July