Critic Reviews

Enlivened with droll wit and framed with robust sensitivity, O'Horten is an amusing and entrancing personal portrait. Succinct in its visualizations and crisp in its pacing, its deferential storytelling is in sync with its Odd subject.

Odd is played by Baard Owe, a trim, fit man with a neat mustache, who may cause you to think a little of James Stewart, Jacques Tati or Jean Rochefort.

O'Horten is a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism - a Bent Hamer movie, in other words.

Jack Nicholson's dyspeptic retiree in "About Schmidt" would no doubt identify with O'Horten's entertaining pain.

O’Horten feels like a waking dream. It's a film of subtle, insinuating charm, a character study about an eminently sane, reasonable man unsteadily navigating an increasingly insane, unreasonable world.

Director Bent Hamer ("Factotum") keeps things drily amusing throughout.

On screen non-stop, Owe is Buster Keaton-like perfection.

The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.

This is a gentle comedy, both funny and melancholy, about a timid soul who discovers the necessity of embracing life in all its absurdity and unlooked-for joy.

In a literal sense this delightful film, in Norwegian with English subtitles, is about retirement and the prospect of loss. But Mr. Hamer, a poet of the droll and askew, sends the aptly named Odd--it's also a common Norwegian name--on a cockeyed journey from regret through comic confusion to a lovely eagerness for new adventures.