O’ Horten: Boring Is the New Fun!

It’s boring. It really is. O’Horten—a very slow, very
Norwegian, almost imperceptibly comedic comedy—is a very boring
movie and therefore I will not blame you if you are bored. However!
Hear me out. Odd Horten (Bård Owe) is an aging train conductor
(his life thus far a plotted course of tracks, tunnels, and timetables)
facing his first day of retirement. Retirement is the opposite of a
train track: It’s a vast, lonely expanse of pointless possibility.
Horten, for the time free and alone (his only family is a mother wiped
blank by Alzheimer’s), wanders along through a series of strange,
snow-muffled little happenings. He loses his pipe. He falls asleep in
the wrong places. He has to wear a pair of ladies shoes (how silly!).
He befriends a drunken diplomat who claims, dubiously, to be able to
drive while blindfolded: “Today is a beautiful day for driving blind,
Horten!”

It all sounds like just another fusty, folksy movie about misspent
youth (“All my friends jumped, but not me. And now it’s too late”), the
melancholic cuteness of old age, and the mundane terror of narrowing
into an unknowable nothing. And, of course, it is. There’s some clunky
symbolism like when, in a rare moment of human connection, we see train
cars coupling (for that matter, see also my train-tracks metaphor
above). But the film’s meticulous reserve—anchored beautifully by
Owe’s performance, which embraces oddness while absolutely refusing to
goof off—turns boredom into a strength. This isn’t dullness
you’re witnessing; it’s mighty restraint. If you can submit to the
glacial pace, O’Horten becomes something surreal and lovely,
with the well-appointed, educational stillness of a natural-history
diorama.