A Man Called Ove(2015)

Best Foreign Language Film Oscar Nominee

Ove (Rolf Lassgard) is a cranky, sardonic widower in his sixties, embittered towards just about everyone and everything around him. He is the only one that cares about -and goes to lengths towards seeing the enforcement of- the rules of the neighbourhood association he belongs to, much to everyone else’s annoyance and dismay. Under that façade of hardness, however, lies a deep sense of loneliness, frustration with the turnout of his life, depression for having lost his beloved wife not long ago and a constant desire and intention of committing suicide -which he tries recurrently throughout the film, by various methods, only to be stopped before being successful-.

A new family moves across the street: a nice Iranian immigrant woman called Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), her Swedish husband Patrick (Tobias Almborg) and their two young girls. They accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox during their moving in, on the first day, which displeases the old man. However, rather reluctantly, he slowly starts to open and warm up to them, which somewhat also softens his ways overall.

In flashbacks, we come to know about key past events in Ove’s life that explain why he came to be the way he is in the present: the loss of his mother at a very young age; how his father, despite being loving and responsible, barely communicated with him, although he awoke Ove’s interest for engines; the death of his father when Ove had just finished high school; how he later lost the family house in a fire when two local bureaucrats declared interest in the land for building a massive project and prevented the fire’s extinction, alluding the house “was to be demolished anyway”, rendering him homeless; how he met his wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll) in a train, she encouraged him to get a degree in Engineering and they eventually got married; how he used to be friends with the now wheelchair-bound neighbourhood chairman Rune (Borje Lundberg) but, then, they fell out over a difference in cars’ taste and when Rune overthrew Ove as the chairman; and how, in the middle of a getaway in Spain, the bus in which Ove and Sonja were touring crashes, causing her to lose the baby and be left confined to a wheelchair.

Over time, Ove improves his relationship with the people surrounding him and even undertakes some acts of kindness: he teaches Parvaneh how to drive and babysits her girls; he takes in a neighbourhood stray cat as his companion; he repairs a bike that he took away from a young man named Adrian (Simon Edenroth) and gives it back to him; later, he takes in Adrian’s friend, Mirsad (Poyan Karimi), who has come out as gay and left homeless by his family because of it; and even stands up to two men who keep trying to take Rune away into a nursing home with the help of a journalist who exposes them as embezzlers.

One day, Ove collapses and is taken to the hospital; there, Parvaneh -whom he listed as next of kin- is told that he has an enlarged heart but should be OK. She goes into labour (she was pregnant during the whole film) and has a boy. Ove celebrates with them. Months later, after noticing, during a snowfall, that Ove hadn’t cleaned his drive nor was up, Parvaneh and Patrick go to his house and discover that he died in his sleep. He has also left specific instructions -in his well-known, acid way- for his funeral, which is attended by those who had become closer to him.

The second-to-last sequence of the film shows Ove happily meeting up with Sonja once more on that same train where they first meet; then, the film ends with the neighbours returning to the block, as one of Parvaneh’s girls makes sure the main gate is properly locked behind them – one of those things Ove so jealously saw over, all the time-.