Film review: Touch is a gentle, life-affirming and gorgeously detailed film

This film has superb performances across the board as the old and young Kristófers embark on quixotic adventures of the heart

Pálmi Kormákur and Kôki star in Touch

• Touch
• ★★★★☆ 
• Cinematic release

Touch (15A) opens in Iceland just as the Covid pandemic begins. Rather than go into lockdown like the rest of the world, restaurateur Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) boards a plane for London ‘to take care of unfinished business’.

It was in London in the late 1960s that the firebrand student of economics abandoned college: in a revolutionary act that shocks his fellow students, the young Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur) drops out to wash dishes in a Japanese restaurant, where he falls in love with Japanese culture, starts writing haikus and loses his heart to Miko (Koki), the daughter of his new employer, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki).

Written by Baltasar Kormákur and Olaf Olafsson, with Kormákur directing, Touch plays out by way of extended flashbacks to the ’60s, as the seriously ill Kristófer, who is already beginning to lose his memory, recalls the halcyon days of first love that blossomed half a century ago.

It’s a gentle, life-affirming and gorgeously detailed film with superb performances across the board as the old and young Kristófers embark on quixotic adventures of the heart, the younger wide-eyed and hopeful, the older beaten down by the myriad cruelties of old age but as yet unbowed.