At first glance, Touch seems like a sudden change of pace for Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, a quietly polished adaptation of the book (in this case, fellow countryman Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s novel of the same name) that could easily pass for a BBC presentation. It’s in keeping with his action-thriller output, though, the story of a man on a mission; granted, it’s got nothing to do with wild lions (Beast, 2022), mountaineering (Everest, 2015) or Colombian drug cartels (Contraband, 2012), but older viewers will respond to its hero’s perilous journey into the past, risking Covid and his stepdaughter’s disapproval in his bid to solve a mystery that’s dogged him for 50 years.

If it weren’t for the subtitles, you’d swear this was an early-2000s British film, following the Brit-lit conventions established by the film adaptations of best-sellers like Ian McEwan’s Atonement and On Chesil Beach , or Graham Swift’s Last Orders , or Julian Barnes’s Metroland . Together, they form a kind of cinema of regret, and Atonement aside, they largely focus on men discovering that their lives are almost over, with one piece missing.

That man here is Kristofer (Egil Ólafsson), a recently widowed restaurateur still struggling to navigate his new life alone. Kristofer has some health issues, with urgent MRI results coming up, and to keep his mind alert he has a daily ritual that begins when he wakes up at 5:30 a.m., which involves him reciting his social security number, the menu of the day, and a Japanese haiku. This morning, however, will be different. Kristofer pulls out a box of mementos, grabs some old notebooks, and leaves his restaurant without opening it, instead hanging a sign in the window that indicates it won’t be open for a while. After apologizing to a photo of his dead wife, he drives to the airport and boards a plane to London, ignoring warnings of a deadly epidemic.

So the year is 2020, and Kristofer arrives in late March, just days before the global lockdown, checking into an impossibly snooty hotel. In flashback, we see how much his life has changed: 50 years earlier, he’s now an idealistic hippie (Pálmi Kormákur) studying at the London School of Economics. His friends want to change the world, and The Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” is the soundtrack to their revolution, discussed over pints of bitter in smoky pubs. Bored of their banter, Kristofer drops out, taking a job washing dishes at Nippon, a Japanese restaurant—which would have been highly unusual for the time—run by Mr. Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki).