Touch

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, Touch follows a dying man (Egill Ólafsson’s Kristófer) as he embarks on a journey to track down a woman from his past – with much of the picture detailing a young Kristófer’s (Pálmi Kormákur) experiences within a London-based Japanese restaurant. Filmmaker Kormákur, armed with his and Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, delivers a plodding, woefully uninvolving drama that progresses at a snail’s pace and contains few (if any) wholeheartedly compelling elements and attributes, as the movie, which runs a periodically endless 121 minutes, suffers from an ongoing emphasis on Kristófer’s far-from-engrossing exploits within that aforementioned restaurant – with the arms-length atmosphere heightened by an absence of interesting, compelling digressions and dialogue that’s often impossible to comfortably discern (ie the accents are mostly impenetrable, ultimately). And while some of the narrative’s current-day sequences are, comparatively, basically watchable, Touch builds towards a emotionally-charged climax that’s hardly able to pack the potent, resonant punch for which Kormákur is obviously striving – which does, in the final analysis, cement the movie’s place as a fairly palpable misfire from a usually-reliable director.

*1/2 out of ****