Avis Metacritic

Director Baltasar Kormákur and his actors err on the side of restraint, delivering a balanced, absorbing human drama.

Author Olaf Olafsson helped write the screenplay and you can feel his intentions throughout. There is a literary beauty woven throughout the film. He asks you to examine what it means to reach out and touch someone — or have someone touch you. Both the physical and the metaphysical are orchestrated wonderfully.

What’s worth taking away from the film is its peacefulness. There are moments of friendship and family and workplace camaraderie that are real and charming.

Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

Ultimately, the film does its job with skill and heart.

Touch rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.

Touch is a worthy consideration of the things that matter most when the clock is running out, but it could have been more focused.

I admire this film’s craft. And I would’ve appreciated a messier, inner-life impulse to go with it.

Emotional shortcomings aside, Touch still pulls you in, an immersive story of alien worlds — the 1960s, Iceland and Japan — sympathetically and patiently told, a lovely two hour break from the world and the fresh waves of bad news that stain even the best of times.

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.