Touch · reception & legacy
2024 · Baltasar Kormákur
How Touch has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A quiet climb rather than a splashy debut: it opened small in summer 2024, became the year's biggest homegrown hit in Iceland, and rode word-of-mouth all the way to the Oscars' international-feature shortlist.
What's debated
The split is between critics who found it a bit too soft and sentimental and the audiences (and plenty of Letterboxd reviewers) who came out wrecked — graceful late-life romance or handsome tearjerker-by-numbers?
Where it stands
For cinephiles it's 'the gentle one' in Baltasar Kormákur's filmography — the tender outlier from the Everest and 2 Guns action guy that gets recommended to anyone chasing another quiet, decades-spanning romance.
★ Did you know? Kormákur cast his own son, Pálmi Kormákur, as the young lead, opposite Kōki — model, musician, and daughter of Japanese superstar Takuya Kimura — and the film went on to become Iceland's Oscar entry (Kormákur's fifth time repping the country) and make the shortlist.