‘Touch’ Review: Baltasar Kormákur’s Melancholy Lost-Love Story Is Familiar But Charming
deadline.comOn the surface, Touch seems to be a sudden change of pace for Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, a quiet and polished film-of-the-book (in this case, the novel of the same name by fellow countryman Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson) that could easily pass for a BBC presentation.
It does, however, square with his action-thriller output, being the story of a man on a mission; admittedly, nothing to do with savage lions (Beast, 2022), mountaineering (Everest, 2015) or Colombian drug cartels (Contraband, 2012), but older audiences will respond to its hero’s perilous journey into the past, risking Covid and the disapproval of his stepdaughter in his bid to solve a mystery that has haunted him for 50 years.
If it wasn’t for the subtitles, you’d swear this was a British movie from the early 2000s, following the Brit-lit conventions established along the way by the film adaptations of bestsellers such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and On Chesil Beach, or Graham Swift’s Last Orders, or Julian Barnes’s Metroland.
Together, they make up a kind of cinema of regret, and apart from Atonement, largely focus on men who find their lives almost over with one piece still missing.
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