Telluride by the Sea: O'Horten
“It seems most everything comes too late … so nothing comes too late,” someone tells Odd Horten, a shy, willfully isolated man whose life has been organized around the rigid rituals associated with his career as a train engineer. Now at mandatory retirement age and, robbed of his normal patterns, Horten finds chaos and death, in forms alternately poignant and deliciously humorous, around every corner. Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories, Factotum) dramatizes his hero’s perplexity with a cool, elegant precision, and assisting Hamer enormously is Bard Owe, who gives O’Horten his charmingly underplayed dignity. As the film progresses, we see Horten making small changes—tiny affirmations that offer a deeply moving sense of the resilience and flexibility demonstrated by humans in transition.
(Norway, 2008, 90m)