Converging Worlds and Lives In The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

In Benjamin Ree’s 2023 documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, we are afforded the chance to witness a life fittingly deemed remarkable. A life full of friendships, compassion, persistence, love and passion. These aspects show up in ways some viewers might not expect at first, but quite quickly they start to feel as natural and normal as they should.

 

The documentary tells the story of Mats Steen. He was a Norwegian man who was diagnosed with a disorder called Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It’s an incurable degenerative disorder that causes progressive muscle weakening and loss. As his condition worsened, he started to spend more and more time in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft rather than with his family. He passed away from complications caused by Duchenne at the age of 25. After his passing, his family was surprised by the numerous condolences that arrived by email from people around the world, telling of memories with Mats that the family was completely unaware of. Bit by bit, the family uncovers the experiences and connections Mats created in World of Warcraft, where he went by the name Ibelin.

 

The wonderful thing about the documentary is how well it’s able to balance all the different perspectives. The most important of these perspectives is obviously Mats’, which the film is able to present by using large excerpts from his blog Musings of life and by utilizing the chat logs that have been collected over the years in World of Warcraft. The blog posts are an especially valuable document, as Mats’ writing is very open to his own experience, without holding back on the painful feelings, but also highlighting the optimism. For example, he might lament the opportunities that haven’t been available to him, but also note how the bad things have shaped him to be who he is and shows gratefulness for the things he has. It can be a tendency in lesser documentaries to overshadow the voice of the main subject with too much dialogue from associated people, but Ree’s documentary gets the mix just right.

 

Other perspectives also get plenty of space, which is quite critical in this film’s case. The film explores the influence that Mats had on the people that he played the game with, which becomes clearly evident from the interviews with these individuals. From helping a person convince their parents of the importance of connections over the net to a mother and a son connecting more due to Mats’ encouragement, the documentary finds many compelling subplots from these interactions. These interactions are rich enough that the film has many satisfying arcs stemming from these stories, with the combined energy of these smaller stories resulting in a great emotional heft.

 

The aspect that makes the documentary unique is how well it’s able to capture the experiences that Mats and the other players had in World of Warcraft. With the help of chat logs from the game, dynamic camera positions inside the game environments, expressive character animation, voice acting for the in-game messages and also musings from Mats and the other players as voice-over, the documentary gets close to what it must have felt to be in those situations. Experiences of love, companionship, frustration, reconciliation and more are beautifully brought to life within the virtual world. The highest compliment for the filmmaking I can give is that the distinction between the “real” world and the digital world of World of Warcraft started to very quickly blur. The film does explore that distinction between the digital and the “real” world and the limitations and the possibilities these worlds can impose on different people, and thankfully the film isn’t dogmatic about these topics but gives a lot of food for thought.

 

This documentary could very easily have been mostly about proving the value of digital interaction, but with Ree’s approach it becomes a deeply felt portrait of these specific people and their relationships. That same emotional tact also extends to how it registers as a film about a person with a disability. The documentary gets into specific details of Mats’ disability in informative ways, but those don’t solely define Mats in the film just like he wouldn’t have wanted them to. The film is about people, first and foremost, rather than easy categorizations.

 

Basic Information

Title: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

Director: Benjamin Ree

Available at: Netflix

Release Date: October 25, 2024

Running time: 1h 44min

 

Image: Official promo picture for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, courtesy of Netflix

You might also like

---

More from Game-related media

---