Loading ...Screen Daily - Bent Hamer’s unique blend of absurdist humour and aching melancholy has never worked better than in O’ Horten, an arthouse charmer which should duplicate a similar sales and distribution pattern to his last Norwegian film Kitchen Stories (2003) and win over a new legion of specialised fans.
Hamer, who scored a minor international ripple with his first English language venture Factotum in 2005, is nevertheless more comfortable working in his native Norwegian and employing his wonderfully deadpan sense of comedy which is somewhere between Aki Kaurismaki and Monty Python.
Central to O’Horten’s success is Bard Owe, a veteran Norwegian actor based in Copenhagen who has worked with everyone from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Lars Von Trier (most memorably as Dr Bondo in The Kingdom series). Owe plays Odd Horten, a 67 year-old train driver and engineer who has spent his life on the railways and is facing retirement.
His existence is one of comfortable old routines – he devotedly feeds the birds in his apartment, he owns a boat which he has always refused to sell, he regularly goes to see a lady friend Mrs Thogersen (Norby) on one of his train stop-offs. He visits his senile old mother, a former ski-jumper, in a retirement home, lamenting the fact that he was too afraid to jump himself in his youth… [Full Story]
