A Man Called Ove [En man som heter Ove] **** (2015, Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, Filip Berg) – Movie Review

Rolf Lassgård stars as bad-tempered isolated retiree Ove, who spends his days enforcing his block association’s petty rules and visiting his late wife’s grave. Now he’s had enough, he’s suicidal, but even that isn’t going to work out for him.

Because, just when things look really bleak, a family of boisterous new neighbours arrive and move into the terraced house opposite, amazingly proving an unexpected lifeline as he develops an unlikely, but credible friendship with them. The wife, pregnant Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), quickly gets the measure of him, and knows how to handle him.

Sweden’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards, A Man Called Ove is totally sweet and charming, both very funny and very sad, but wise too. Pars brings a lot of quirky, no-nonsense charm that effectively balances Lassgård’s grandstanding portrait of antique despair.

The film is nigh-on irresistible. Even curmudgeons will love it because, hey, it’s a film about a curmudgeon. When Jack Nicholson has finished remaking Toni Erdmann, this can be his next movie. It’s the perfect, eccentric grumpy old man part.

It is written and directed by Hannes Holm, though, rather surprisingly, it is based on a novel, by Fredrik Backman. It is so filmic, you never get the idea that it’s a book adaptation. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine it on the page. Hard, especially, to imagine it without the faces of Lassgård and Pars, and the backdrop of the clinical block they live in.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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