As the world is shutting down amid the spread of Covid-19, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) journeys from Iceland to England to reconnect with a woman he knew when he was younger.  As a youth (Palmi Kormákur), he studied business at the London School of Economics.  On a bit of a dare with his friends, he applies for a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant.  He takes quickly to the work, studying the art of cuisine under owner Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki).  While there, he also discovers a fondness for the chef’s daughter, Miko (Kôki), and the two form a passionate romance until one-day Kristófer reports to work to find Miko and her family have moved back to Japan. 

Baltasar Kormákur directs Touch from a screenplay he co-wrote with Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson.  Focus Features distributed the film, first in Iceland then on a limited theatrical release.  The 121-minute film tells a dual narrative between the past and the present chronicling a decades and country-spanning romance that was cut short before it had a chance to blossom. 

While the film is nonlinear in its approach, it can be divided into three chapters: “Apart,” “In Love,” and “Together.”  It is easiest to balance the film narratively when looking at it linearly because Sigurður Eyþórsson in the edit is asked to constantly switch between the timelines at such a clip that hardly anything has a real chance to build and the audience is left craning from the tonal whiplash.  The structure is not so much a flaw in the pacing, but rather, it was used as a crutch for when the script has written itself to the end of a scene and, unsure of how to continue their thought, the team simply hard resets the story beats by leaping somewhere else on the timeline eliminating the need of transitory scenes altogether. This practice really lowers the stakes of the whole narrative as nothing has a chance to build or breathe. 

Opening in 2020, we find Kristópher closing up his restaurant on the beautiful shores of Iceland.  Kormákur and Ólafsson try to inject some intrigue into this section with a phone call from his daughter whose relationship is already strained long before we find out that he has missed her birthday again.  It helps give some urgency to this section of the film, but by and large it is just padding the run time despite its necessity to the story.  Kristópher is in a race against time to locate Moki while there are still a few flights to catch before the lockdowns begin, but the screenwriters inject these sequences with an odd brand of humor that sits very tonally different than the sequences when young love is raging.  It is not for a lack of energy on Ólafsson’s part in portraying this man as he imbues that character with enough affable and elderly charm that we stay with him, but we would much rather be back in the 1960s with these characters. 

It is the younger cast that brings life to this film in a way that was largely kept away from their elder counterparts.  Kormákur as the young Kristopher has his work cut out for him as the white boy who trains and surpasses the Japanese chefs at their own preparation and methods.  Modern audiences rightfully have little tolerance for these types of white savior adjacent storylines and while the script sets the narrative up as such, that Kriostpher stumbles into the restaurant by pure chance helps endear us to him more so than if he sought out the position.  As for the chemistry between him and Miko, it takes a long while for the ball to get rolling and some of that is because she is already in a relationship, but when they break up Kriostpher makes his move.  Again, it is pretty incredible how charming this storyline is given its socially insidious nature, but the cast really brings us into this world and into their dreams of the future; even if those dreams are not clearly defined, they are always working towards something and never settling.  Unfortunately, given the back and forth on the timeline and that we know they are not together in the future, the film never builds to the dramatic crescendo that it clearly is working towards, so we never get truly swept away in the romanticism. 

The film has a chance to salvage this in its final unofficial chapter, “Together.”  The older Kristopher retains his persistent tendencies as he finds a flight from London to Japan and from there to Miko’s current apartment and he proceeds to wait outside until someone lets him in.  It is meant to be a romantic gesture, but it does not quite land as intended because up until now, we have really only seen the older Kristopher as a real curmudgeon.  We do not view his obsession as dangerous, but we never really get a good sense of how we should be receiving him either. 

Their eventual reunion is delivered as a pretty straightforward conversation and is probably one of the longest scenes of the film.  It is also the most poignant.  It is revealed that Miko is a ‘Hibakusha,’ one living with the effects of radiation from the nuclear bombs.  As such, her father, noticing the growing romance between the two and fearing that the radiation poisoning would cause potentially fatal complications during pregnancy, moves the family back to Japan under the guise of a holiday.  We probably would not have gotten a conclusion this deeply interrogated had Touch been told totally linearly, and certainly not is it was only framed as a young love tragedy, but the scene is still not as powerful or cathartic for us as the audience as it is for the pair of reunited lovers.  The characters experience that purging of feelings that had been bottled and brewed for decades, but that same experience does not translate across the barrier of the screen because of the puzzle-piece nature of the film’s structure. 

Touch is an enjoyable film that is not without a few wrong turns along the way that really hold it back from achieving everything it desires to be.  It is a little too stationary to be the truly sweeping, missed connections epic that it treats itself as, but in a strange twist of events, it is when the film is in the 60s – which thankfully does take up the majority of its running time – is where all the elements gel together and create something truly engaging.  Trying to do too much, the screenwriting team overcomplicates the narrative with the 2020 storyline, and though it does bring up some interesting and important ideas, it all feels a little slight given the heavy nature of it all and how cursory the script engages with these themes.  Nothing is truly ill-intentioned in the film, but it does not rise to its own occasion as a ships in the night tragedy, either, which is a real shame as it does lay out a lot of goodwill and win over a skeptic audience only to let them down in the final act.