‘Touch’ review: A brief, youthful encounter, rekindled 50 years later

“Touch” operates as an Icelandic “Brief Encounter,” complicated by two things: sexual fulfillment in place of agonized sexual repression and a 50-years-later search for the one who got away.

The story marries romance with mystery with carefully mapped skill. In Iceland, early in the pandemic, a widower, Kristófer, is living his comfortable but narrow existence in the village where he runs his restaurant. Plagued with memory loss, ducking his doctor’s entreaties to discuss his latest MRI, Kristofer has come uneasily to terms with some form of dementia clouding his very near future.

With time and lucidity running short, Kristófer embarks on a hunt for emotional treasure. Keeping his grown stepdaughter partly in the loop regarding his plans, he flies to London just as things approach COVID lockdown in search of his first love, Miko, the daughter of a Japanese restaurateur whom young, idealistic Kristófer met in the late 1960s.

The affair, more or less clandestine, ended suddenly back then, with Miko and her father disappearing into a chapter of their private family story unread by Kristófer. What happened? And why? “Touch” sustains steady if diagrammatic interest, toggling between the late ’60s flashbacks and the early 2020s, the latter charting Kristófer’s travels from London to Tokyo to Hiroshima in search of answers.

In the 2022 novel on which the movie is based, Miko first establishes contact with Kristófer. Adapted by director/co-writer Baltasar Kormákur and novelist and fellow Icelandic native Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, the film version uses a different, less specific point of narrative departure. The Japanese word kodokushi, translated as “lonely death” or the fear of dying alone, serves as a leitmotif here. Certainly Kristófer, played with serene authority by Egill Ólafsson, knows the weight of that word all too well. He makes it his mission to learn if Miko, if she’s still alive, feels the same weight.

The movie glides along, handsomely. Director Kormákur, best known in America for his action pictures “Contraband” (with Mark Wahlberg) and “2 Guns” (Wahlberg, Denzel Washington and Paula Patton), establishes a mood and rhythm of preordained heartbreak, depicted at a tactful remove. Much of the flashback footage takes place in Miko’s family restaurant in London, among the staff (Masahiro Motoki plays Miko’s widower father). In the ’60s scenes, young Kristófer is played by Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son. He captures the character’s oft-remarked on gentleness. Beyond that, though, he’s somewhat overmatched by his fellow actors, especially Kôki, who bringing a crystalline vibrancy to Miko’s turbulent struggles with her father, and her own desires.

I can’t quite put my finger on what’s missing in “Touch,” and why a well-carpentered, attractively realized film ends up feeling a little superficial. Maybe it’s the material’s hands-off approach to the elder version of Kristófer, whose symptoms of degeneration are barely visible. Maybe it’s the way the culminating scenes (no spoilers here) hit their emotional marks, dutifully, in ways that feel more dramatically tidy than authentically lifelike. Different as they are, we don’t read books or see movies like “The Notebook” or “Touch” for realistic touchstones; they’re romantic fantasies to the bone. I admire this film’s craft. And I would’ve appreciated a messier, inner-life impulse to go with it.

“Touch” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some sexuality)

Running time: 2:00

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 12. In Icelandic, Japanese and English with English subtitles.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.