Synopsis
Touch is a contemplative, emotionally dense drama helmed by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur. Premiering in 2024, the film adapts the award-winning novel Snerting (Touch) by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, who collaborated with the author on the screenplay. The narrative centres on a widowed man who, in the twilight of his years, revisits a haunting, half-remembered love in the hope of achieving a long-delayed resolution.
The action is anchored in the Icelandic archipelago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Under its isolating sky, Kristófer, seventy-something, and the proprietor of a small, fading bistro, occupies an empty daily ritual. Diagnosed with a history of early-onset dementia, he is urged by his physician to rekindle ties with formative figures. The physician’s benign suggestion unlocks the recollection of Miko, a Japanese dancer who, in a narrow London interlude, became his first and only illicit secret. The retracing of Kristófer’s Y-shaped itinerary—between Japan, London, and the tender, frozen island he calls home—takes shape, interweaving the sensory ache of the past with his diminishing present.
The narrative unfolds across two braided timelines. One strand traces the aging Kristófer as he travels from Reykjavik to London and then to Japan searching for Miko. The second strand, set in the late 1960s, recalls the nineteen-year-old Kristófer, a university dropout who accepts a position washing dishes at a Japanese restaurant in London. He is drawn to Miko—the proprietor’s daughter—despite their disparate backgrounds and the constraints imposed by her parents. Their clandestine affair, brief and bittersweet, carves a permanent, if inarticulable, wound.
Miko’s abrupt absence in the younger Kristófer’s fate is neither permitted a reason nor permitted closure. The aging man’s pursuit of her, decades later, unfolds against the bleak restrictions of a pandemic and the creeping .mislaying of memory, reframing his quest into a pursuit of lost emotional veracity. The act of seeking is eventually eclipsed by the act of becoming, a cathartic reversal of flight turned sober return.
Cast and Characters
Egill Ólafsson embodies the elder Kristófer. He renounces sentiment in favour of suggestion, allowing the man’s well-aged surface to tremble for a moment inside every recalled explosion of wonder, shame, and guarded expectancy. In his stillness the character receives unostentatious grandeur, grace, and uncertain closure.
Pálmi Kormákur, the filmmaker’s son, conveys young Kristófer’s inner landscape with rare delicacy. His evocation of first love rehearses unguarded yearning and soft tremors of professional restraint. Across unscripted spaces of stillness, the youthful idealist is rendered palpable.
Kōki, an emerging Japanese talent, inhabits the role of young Miko. Her performance is disciplined, yet the smallest tremors of the voice and the contour of a lowering eyelid betray flickering ambivalence. Torn between the secret countryside she dreams of and the rigid choreography of home, she walks the narrowest of ledges.
Yôko Narahashi, depicting the elder Miko, reprises the role with unembellished elegance. Her long conversations with Kristófer at dusk, taken near the film’s end, crystallise the narrative’s emotional centre, threading the youthful strands into an unbroken, luminous line.
Masahiro Motoki embodies Takahashi-san, restaurant owner and patriarch, with an unassuming authority. His quiet edicts, pronounced in the amber light of the kitchen, centre the unspeakable codes of a culture that compartmentalises love and duty, rendering the unbridgeable slow and silent.
Direction and Cinematography
Baltasar Kormákur, having convincingly trespassed from soaring commercial to contained emotional realms, pulls Touch into modest orbit. Stagebound, yet yearning for presence, the film unravels as hushed meditation. The screenplay, a co-creation with its literary progenitor, suspends inward voice—mutation of the page—at the disciplined pace of lived seconds.
Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson’s cinematography is marked by a deliberate restraint. Iceland’s ragged fjords and canyons appear as spare tableaux; their crisp contours invite sustained silence. In the London flashbacks of the 1960s, sepia-tinged glass and brushed chrome furnish a room-tone warmth, as if every busy street and empty café is already a remembered whisper. Contemporary scenes, recorded under lockdown, are lean and underpopulated. Masked pedestrians ghost across wide, echoing pavements, while soft glass windows reflect the grey of isolation, allowing the larger theme of inward withdrawal to LED every frame.
Högni Egilsson’s score is minimal, almost spatial. The piano exhalations are melancholy without sentiment; sustained strings buoy a stillness that never trembles. Layered ambient tones—subsonic pulses and the barely audible ringing of tuned, muted glass—join melody and silence until music is indistinguishable from air, both escorting audiences deeper into the moist, dark passage of the mind. Sigurður Eyþórsson’s editing mirrors these soundscapes. Cuts are soft and unlabelled; flashes of ash-colored memory and geo-tagged present slip against one another like transparent sheets, assembling the audience’s own mental collage more than the film’s. Only the skin of a highway overpass or the prism of a rain-smeared window aloud when scenes draws apart, allowing the two rhythms of time to exhale and merge.
Touch is a catalogue of intangible, shared things. First love’s pulse, always felt as halfway; the echo of language never spoken; the invitation to reconciliation that unravels into a question unasked. In company and absence the archetypal happen at the same address. The film accepts the old past uncheaply, as sacred, or at least as notoriously blessed—redolent of burnt-lemon cinnamon and chapped old hands—where longing, grief, and beauty are not ingredients but neighbours, pushy beside one another and yet to thank the blood of the living oameni wyo address these soil-tinged memories, Alentanto fields ingrained existing beyond the story of one.
The narrative’s dual timeline reveals how youthful choices resonate in later life. Kristófer’s odyssey is cartographic and cathartic: in tracing Miko’s whereabouts he attempts to decipher the unarticulated patterns governing his own existence—one question from five decades past remains conspicuously unresolved.
Time, inexorable and intimate, subjects the filmic characters to memory’s attrition, the loneliness of bereavement, and the accelerated demand for emotional settlement. The pandemic, ineluctably present, grounds the contemporary milieu in a paradox: the distinct obliteration of physical conviviality renders remaining bonds both hindered and agonizingly vital.
Reception and Critical Acclaim
Touch garnered substantive acclaim on the festival circuit, commended for a deliberate emotional economy and for performances of remarkable tensile restraint. Spectators reported a deliberate unease attuning them to the interiority that is often eclipsed in the spectacle-driven contemporary market.
Critical consensus commended Egill Ólafsson’s rendition of the elder Kristófer as a defining maturity, while Kōki’s debut in adult roles was framed as a noteworthy threshold. Forage on the chemistry of performances was concentrated in the youthful vignettes, the authenticity of which drew adjectives such as intimate and wrenching, repeatedly named as a filmic axis.
The film, recognized as Iceland’s official contender for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, earned a shortlist mention, drawing acclaim for its understated elegance and humane storytelling craft. Though it did not receive the final award, the nomination itself attested to its resonance across international audiences.
Conclusion
Touch remains a film of quiet impressions, eloquently addressing the heart of anyone who has loved, mourned, or regarded the past with a wistful eye. Here, a tale once displaced by chronology reveals itself as radiant, illuminating how love—though prematurely curtailed or forever unresolved—can reverberate across a lifetime. Guided by a measured rhythm, the performances pulse with measured sincerity, the direction exudes restraint, and what emerges is an emotional articulation that persists well beyond the final frame.
The story abjures showy climactic gestures, opting instead for a contemplative pilgrimage where refracted intimacy, the delicacy of remembrance, and the stubborn persistence of care after expansive quietude take precedence. Within this measured traverse, one learns that there exists an exiled language of affection, perhaps, that time’s influence, far from muting, patiently waits to re-articulate.
Watch free movies on Fmovies