Touch: a cold yet beautiful Icelandic drama exploring lost love across two timeframes

‘Touch’ explores lost love across two timeframes on opposite sides of the world, as a man comes to terms with the loneliness of the Covid pandemic.

Icelandic drama Touch stars Palmi Kormakur, as the young Kristofer and Japanese model, musician and actor Koki as the young Miko. Co-written and directed by Baltasar Kormakur.

Icelandic drama Touch, co-written and directed by Baltasar Kormakur, is a beautiful film about lost love. It is set mainly in London and Japan, and it unfolds across two timeframes.

In 2020, with the Covid pandemic prohibiting the touch of the title, 72-year-old Kristofer (Egill Olafsson) makes an impromptu trip from his home in Iceland to London and then Tokyo.

He makes the decision after seeing a doctor who recommends a brain scan and suggests it may be a good time to “take care of unfinished business”. For Kristofer, a widower, that unfinished business is the woman he fell in love with 51 years before.

This lost love set-up is reminiscent of the 2015 drama 45 Years, directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Charlotte Rampling, who received an Oscar nomination, and Tom Courtenay. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it

The second timeframe shows the young Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur, the actor son of the director) falling in love with Miko (Japanese model, musician and actor Koki). His love is ­returned.

They meet when Kristofer abandons his studies at the London School of Economics and lands a job as a dishwasher at the Japanese restaurant owned by Miko’s father (Masahiro Motoki).

The all-Japanese staff call him “the foreigner” but quickly grow fond of him. He learns Japanese. It’s 1969 and John Lennon and Yoko Ono have made headlines with their “bed-in” protests against the Vietnam war.

This film is based on the 2022 novel Snerting by Icelandic writer Olafur Johann Olafsson, who co-wrote the script. It is emotionally moving but not without humour.

The young Kristofer questions the merit of a protest held at five-star hotels. His older self, reminded he was a student radical, an “old anarchist”, says with a smile, “Now I’m just old.”

The director blends the two timeframes beautifully. As Kristofer departs on the trip, he thinks of himself and Miko in bed, their hands touching each other’s wrists. The moment where he and Miko profess their love, and confess what they did to facilitate it, is open, honest and direct.

However this is a young love that cannot last. This is not Miko’s doing but her father’s. When the separation comes it is an almost unbearable ghosting of Kristofer. It is a physical and geographical removal.

Before this happens, he learns Miko and her family are not from Tokyo but Hiroshima. Her mother was pregnant with her when the atomic bomb incinerated the city.

All her mother could remember, Miko tells Kristofer, was the “burning earth, black rain and river filled with floating corpses”. She survived and Miko was born, but as a child tainted by that day.

The overwhelming question of this movie is will the older Kristofer find Miko? Is she still alive? If so, is she still in London or has she returned to Japan? If they do find each other after 51 years apart what will happen?

All of these questions are answered. A lot can happen in anyone’s life across a half-century. When we learn more about Miko and why her father did what he did it is unnerving.

Is there something worse than loving someone and losing them for five decades? Yes, there is. This film about two people who leave an irreversible touch on each other brought tears to my eyes.