Parents' Guide to Touch

Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur (Everest, 2 Guns) returns to his native tongue—albeit a tale that moves from London to Japan—for this romantic drama adapted from a novel of the same name. There's a real tenderness to Touch, a bittersweet quality that derives from an overriding feeling of nostalgia and that sense that memories can be both beautiful and painful, at the same time. The film is about how two people are bound together by a shared humanity despite their different cultures. In the flashback scenes, Kristofer, a young man from Iceland (now played by Palmi Kormakur, the director's real-life son), gets a job working in a Japanese restaurant in 1960s London. There he meets Miko (Koki), the Japanese daughter of the restaurant's owner, and the pair start an intense but short-lived love affair. The actors share a great chemistry, while director Kormakur borrows stylistically from each of their respective countries. There's the undeniable whimsicality of Scandinavian cinema, epitomized in some quirky supporting parts. But then there endearing stillness that comes with Japanese cinema. The film also gets bonus points for being a rare case of having COVID-19 take up a part of the narrative, and for it not to be too jarring. The pandemic was an awful time, but it was a shared experience, something that the world went through together. This plays into the movie's leading theme, which is built on being open-minded and curious, and making the world seem a much smaller place.