Running time: 126 minutes
Starring: Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Rachel Keller, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Truman Hanks
Directed by: Marc Forster
The story: Grumpy Otto Anderson is set in his ways and doesn’t like to get too involved with people - people are idiots. When a new family moves into his neighbourhood, Otto meets his match in Marisol and the unlikeliest of friendships begins.
The verdict: There are two magic words which will immediately want to make me go and see any film, and those two magic words are Tom Hanks. No matter the project, Hanks’ involvement always piques my interest and A Man Called Otto was no different.
It seems almost pointless to say but Hanks was brilliant and it was good fun to watch him as such a bad tempered character. The supporting cast was also great and I particularly liked Mariana Treviño as Marisol.
A Man Called Otto is the second adaptation of the novel A Man Called Ove and a remake of the Swedish film of the same name. I have heard great things about both the novel and the Swedish adaptation, but must confess to having neither read the book nor seen the Swedish film. However, A Man Called Otto has definitely inspired me to remedy that.
There have been so many films that I have shed a tear to, but there have only been a handful of times in which I have sat in the cinema and completely broken down. A Man Called Otto didn’t just make me cry - it made me bawl. This was full on, shaking, tears streaming down my face crying.
On the surface of it, A Man Called Otto is arguably a reasonably formulaic film in which if I asked you what you think might happen based on the synopsis then you’d probably quite easily tell me. However, none of that mattered to me or affected my viewing in any way. I found the film to be incredibly poignant and significant.
A Man Called Otto is a film about life. It’s about the people we meet who push our lives in unexpected directions. It’s about the importance of friends and the effect of friendship. It’s about the passing of time and the realisation of time gone by, never to be returned. It’s about love, the loves of our lives and being in love. And perhaps most of all, it’s about loss, being lost and grief in all it’s overwhelming difficulty and how it can swallow us whole.
A Man Called Otto also recognises so many of the moments in life that may seem tiny but in fact are the moments that we look back on with the most happiness and longing. In one scene, a character reaches out to touch the hand of someone no longer there and it was in the moments like that where the tears flowed openly.
There was a profundity in this film that I find hard to put into words but became tangible as the film progressed. A Man Called Otto made me think about my own life and the people I love. And maybe this sounds excessive but it made me want to be a better person.
Sometimes there are films that you watch that just affect you greatly and it won’t be necessarily be the same for everyone. However, the greatest films are the ones in which you don’t feel quite the same as when you first walked into the cinema. A Man Called Otto spoke to me in a way that was incredibly personal and provoked so many emotions that I feel that I can only conclude that it was a pretty great film.
The rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and a half
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