‘Touch’ Review: Memory, Mystery and Lost Love Remind Us What It Is to Be Human

Seventy-one is as good a time as any for your first tattoo. Or so figures the soft-spoken and deliberate Kristófer, a widower visiting London from his home in Reykjavik in March of 2020. Played as an older man by singer and actor Egill Ólafsson in Touch, a new romantic drama from prolific Icelandic-born director Baltasar Kormákur, Kristófer is attempting to reconcile his past just as the world was about to get blindsided by the future and a pandemic that would claim more than 7 million lives worldwide. (The film’s evocation of those nascent days of the pandemic are both gently amusing and a little traumatic.)

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TOUCH ★★★ (3/4 stars)
Directed by: Baltasar Kormákur
Written by: Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, Baltasar Kormákur
Starring: Egill Ólafsson, Kōki, Pálmi Kormákur, Masahiro Motoki, Yoko Narahashi
Running time: 121 mins.

The tattoo parlor sits in the same spot that once held Nippon, a long-ago shuttered........

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