For a non-gamer like myself, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin served as a crucial document for understanding the rich community that can form via online role-playing games—even among people who may never meet in real life. The documentary centers on Mats Steen, born in Norway with a degenerative muscular disease. A seemingly reclusive gamer to his family, it isn’t until after his death at the age of 25 that they discover the complicated and dynamic social life he led while playing World of Warcraft (Ibelin is the name of Mats’ avatar). Director Benjamin Ree attempts to recreate Mats’ experience by taking dialogue logged during his gaming sessions and using it to guide animated recreations of his Ibelin adventures. Meanwhile, we get interviews with the real-life people whom Mats interacted with while in character. Through these methods we—and Mats’ parents—discover a young man both immensely empathetic to the social anxieties of others and deeply angry about the limits of his own physical condition. As with Rees’ previous film, The Painter and the Thief, you can sense—if not exactly spot—a directorial hand shaping the material in ways that test the limits of the documentary format. But, as in that outing, the techniques ultimately reveal the way art can foster the sort of emotional connection that is vital to the human experience.
(12/1/2024)
