Touch Review
A beautifully meditative movie that explores lost connections across age gaps, cultures and continents.
As COVID hits, the Swedish Kristofer (Egill Olafsson) is diagnosed with cancer. Faced with his own mortality, he decides to try and track down his former love Miko to find out why she abandoned him and their love all those years ago. As he travels to Japan to find her, we see how they came to meet and fall for one another as the younger Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur) gets a job at a Japanese restaurant run by the younger Miko’s (Koki) father, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki).
Touch is a wonderful mix of humour and sorrow. Mixing a modern-day, COVID-set narrative with the older Kristofer, and a london-set heady Beatles-era romance with the younger Kristofer, the film slowly winds towards audience understand across its 2 hour runtime.
Firstly, the modern-day elements. Egill Olafsson is wonderful and deeply funny in his incessant, tired yet hopeful quest across continents to track down his lost love Miko. There are some genuinely hilarious moments here, particularly in his London hotel on the brink of lockdown, and Olafsson plays them pitch perfectly.
Secondly, the flashbacks. These dominate the movie, and the younger Miko and Kristofer are star crossed lovers in a little Japanese restaurant. Both Koki and Palmi Kormakur are charming, convincing and lovely here, but its Masahiro Motoki as Kristofer’s mentor that really provides a distractingly engrossing narrative. As much as we want to focus on the romance, the lovely pseudo father-son relationship kind of captures the spotlight a little.
The film is undeniably beautiful, particularly the golden soaked flashback elements. Baltasar Kormaku also plays with an array of interesting connective tissue between the two narratives; whether it’s some of the widest lens flares I’ve ever seen, or match cuts between train shots, there is something inherently tied between the two eras from the visual storytelling, despite the distinctly different tonalities and palettes.
What stops this film from perhaps reaching its full potential is a clunky ending that lingers ever so slightly, and forgos a potentially subtler and more intriguing one, and some of the awkwardness between the younger Miko and Kristofer in their courting that never truly comes across as sincere. But what should be recognised about this film is how lovely a tale it is, how beautifully it is told, and how calming it is; this is the sort of movie that is both engaging on a purely entertaining level while also broadening your worldview, pulling at your heartstrings, and delighting your eyes.
