On demand: "Touch"

Another change of pace and scenery for the well-travelled Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, probably still best known outside his homeland for his very solid Mark Wahlberg actioner Contraband. Touch is Kormákur's lockdown movie, but it's also that rarest of beasts: an intelligent weepie, hinging on a character - widowed chorister Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson), a greybeard cross between the protagonists of 2019's A White, White Day and 2001's fondly recalled doc Cool & Crazy - who uses the pandemic to settle unfinished business and finds his small world opening right back up again. Shortly before international borders closed, and shortly after receiving a less than positive medical prognosis, Kristófer hops on a plane to London to revisit his halcyon days as an LSE student at the turn of the 1970s; cue flashbacks in which we see his younger self (played by the director's strapping son Pálmi Kormákur) escaping the era's turbulent politics by dropping out and taking a dishwashing gig in a Japanese restaurant. Here, this peaceable John meets his Yoko in the owner's daughter Miko (Kōki), a fellow traveller to London, this time from her hometown of Hiroshima. (Rather cutely, Kormákur hands Pálmi round spectacles and sticks "Give Peace a Chance" on the soundtrack when the pair have their first real conversation: a bit on the nose, but in much the same way a kiss can be on the nose.) The question is what the wearied elder Kristófer means to do with these recollections in the present, given the precarity of his situation: his London hotel, for one, is in the process of shutting down along with everything else, while his time on this Earth would appear more finite still.

The situation involves, maybe even demands, a certain contrivance: a concierge with scant regard for the niceties of data protection, a nursing home where the admissions policy will seem more or less credible depending on how familiar you are with the early 2020s work of Matt Hancock. That I remained more than onside was down to the grounding lived experience Kormákur, co-writer Ólaf Ólafsson and these actors knead into almost every scene. Employer and employee bond over Iceland and Japan's shared fishing heritage; their older selves over a no less shared drinking culture. The flashbacks expand to describe the various ages of this man, showing Kristófer as not just a lover but a father, too, and Kormákur steers his young leads - who do make a cute couple - every bit as affectingly as he does those veterans who presumably require far less guidance. (Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen is on fine form as the casually racist owner of Kristófer's boarding house.) Touch is good on work, on the sharing of experience that surely goes on in the backrooms of our restaurants: Kristófer picks up not just a loved one, but a language, haiku, some basic Japanese dishes. It's even better on borders, which even since the lifting of lockdown restrictions have been tightly guarded and surveilled for various reasons; the coda, by contrast, hinges on a crack in a door, a glimmer of a possibility of a passage into a new and happier phase of life. By that point, Kormákur and Ólafsson have given us a sense of an entire existence, highs, lows, regrets, achievements. You can quibble with some of the detail, but not the river-like sweep, nor the emotional resonance: on some profound level that you possibly wouldn't expect from the director of the Mark Wahlberg actioner Contraband, Touch understands what keeps us apart, isolated, unhappy, and the significance of those connections that - whether temporary or for keeps - continue to keep us all going.

Touch is now streaming via NOW TV, and available to rent via Prime Video.