REVIEW: The Remarkable Life of Ibelin [2024]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 106 minutes
Release Date: March 8th, 2024 (Norway) / October 25th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Euforia Film / Netflix
Director(s): Benjamin Ree

I’m an emotional man, I often follow my heart.

It’s quite the story. When twenty-four-year-old Mats Steen (who suffered from Duchenne muscular dystrophy) passed away, his parents were unaware of the true impact gaming had on his life. To them, allowing Mats to play twelve hours a day was a way to compensate for all the things he couldn’t do. More than simply an escape from the constraints of his disease, however, World of Warcraft also gave him the community and purpose he never found in reality. So, when they signed into his blog to announce his death, they were completely unprepared for the number of responses received from “strangers” calling themselves his friends.

What’s more intriguing than this secrecy from his family, though, is Mats secrecy from his Starlight compatriots online. Just like the former didn’t know he lived an entire life on the computer, the latter had no idea about the hardships he faced off it (at least not at first). He made a very concerted effort to keep these two halves of himself apart so as not to shatter the illusion he crafted for himself. Director Benjamin Ree reveals this by recreating gameplay and chat transcripts archived by Starlight forums. In them we see a young man facing the anger and fear of death while struggling to maintain the façade—desperate to not lose the strength that living inside this game provided.

He didn’t yet understand that vulnerability would only deepen his connection to those he loved. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is thus as much of an eye-opening journey for Mats’ parents post-mortem as it is evidence of the one he took for himself. He helped people pull themselves out of depression and assisted in bringing a mother and her Autistic son together in ways they never could before. His avatar Ibelin was a private detective in the game, but those who knew him in WoW make it seem he was also a professional confidant. All these lost souls with no one to talk to found salvation in a young man who never thought anyone would ever see him as more than someone to pity.

That a majority of the film is narrated through Mats’ own words (spoken by an actor) only adds to the emotional potency of what’s shared. Add interviews with those who knew him better than those who knew him IRL and you see that this isn’t just some vanity project from parents seeking to immortalize their son. Mats’ impact was authentic. The mark (mostly good, but never perfect) he left on these friends from so many different places around the world was indelible. It’s as much about his legacy as it is evidence of the importance of technology as a means of supplying marginalized communities the necessary tools to overcome physical and psychological barriers.

Dismissing online friends as “fake” is beyond ignorant these days. Our world has flattened so much this century that geography is no longer an insurmountable obstacle to finding like-minded people worthy of your companionship and love. To hear Lisette relay how Mats wrote her parents to please find another solution to her failing grades besides taking away her computer and leaving countless friends worried about her well-being is unforgettably moving. These were teenagers honestly and openly educating adults who simply didn’t know better. It’s a defining theme throughout the film: that we can’t know what we don’t know. Yes, we must be willing to listen and learn, but we must also be willing to speak and share.