Icelandic drama Touch proves that the COVID-cinema genre needs to be locked down

• Touch
• Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
• Written by Baltasar Kormakur and Olafur Johann Olafsson, based on the novel by Olafsson
• Starring Egill Olafsson, Palmi Kormakur and Masahiro Motoki
• Classification PG; 121 minutesa
• Opens in theatres July 12

We haven’t gotten much by way of COVID cinema yet. I don’t mean movies that merely acknowledge this recent seismic period in our lives, such as Glass Onion and Magic Mike’s Last Dance, but movies where the stories and emotions truly spring from the pandemic.

Doug Liman’s heist comedy Locked Down and Steven Soderbergh’s Rear Window-redux Kimi are the earliest and best examples from a limited selection, which also includes the GameStop comedy Dumb Money. And now there’s Baltasar Kormakur’s romantic melodrama Touch, a movie that’s about COVID in the same way that The Best Years of Our Lives was about the Second World War and Born on the Fourth of July was about Vietnam.

The film, about an Icelandic widower named Kristofer (Egill Olafsson), is set just as lockdown measures are taking hold. Restaurants are closing. Flights are grounded. Kristofer, a chef showing early signs of dementia, is left with fading memories, which we keep returning to The English Patient-style, and a palpable sense of longing. Like so many people feeling isolated during lockdown, he sets out to make up for lost time and reconnect with his past. In his case, that doesn’t just mean adding school chums on Facebook but instead searching for the one that got away.

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It’s all pleasant stuff directed by Kormakur, who you might be familiar with from such competent survival thrillers as The Deep, Everest, Adrift and Beast. Touch, adapted from Olafur Johann Olafsson’s novel, is handsome, sentimental and restrained (admirably, in parts). But it also leaves a lot to be desired – yes, a movie about yearning left me yearning – chiefly when it comes to the central romance, which is presented as more ornamental than passionate.

The affair takes place in 1969, around the time that John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their bed-in in Montreal. The film can’t resist the comparison, given that the forbidden couple at its centre shares the same racial makeup.

Young Kristofer (played by the director’s son, Palmi Kormakur) is an economics student and Marxist aligned with his protesting classmates, who are being threatened with suspensions. He’s effectively done with school. So when his friends chide him to “join the proletariat,” Kristofer obliges and becomes a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant. The owner, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki), takes to him, appreciating the privileged dropout’s eagerness to learn about his culture and cuisine.

There’s a whiff of exoticism to these scenes, which is even more pronounced when Kristofer, who works his way up to cook, bats his pouty doe-eyes at Takahashi’s comely daughter Miko (Koki). It doesn’t help that the characters are one-dimensional. Kormakur and Koki simply don’t have the room to stretch Kristofer and Miko beyond tropes. He’s the romantic idealist. She’s the coy object of desire.

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Despite how attractive these two actors are, their eventual hook-up is lacking. You would think a movie called Touch would prioritize sensuality, but everything here is far too delicate to activate the pheromones.

Touch gets more feeling out of its interplay between past and present. This is a movie where memories within memories haunt the contemporary scenes, as COVID rages, and Kristofer’s mobility narrows while he searches for Miko, from England to Japan. We slowly learn that Miko was a child born immediately after Hiroshima, the trauma of which deeply affected Takahashi.

After setting up the story with remarkable breathing room, Kormakur crams a lot into its final act, when the film parses Hiroshima’s impact and the stigma associated with survivors who are referred to as “hibakusha,” within the context of the pandemic. The latter is another devastating event with traumas and stigmas we have yet to unpack. Touch merely wraps all that up in sentimentality, leaving, as mentioned earlier, a lot to be desired. Whatever is lacking, perhaps, is for another COVID movie.