A Man Called Ove

Hannes Holm's A Man Called Ove (En man som heter Ove) opened in 2015 and became the most successful Swedish-language film of its decade in international markets. It received two Academy Award nominations in 2017 (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Makeup and Hairstyling) a rare double for a non-English-language production. Adapted from Fredrik Backman's 2012 novel, which had sold over 2.8 million copies in Swedish before the film was made, it became one of the most exported pieces of contemporary Swedish culture since IKEA itself. Tom Hanks's American remake (A Man Called Otto, 2022) was respectable; Holm's original is irreplaceable.

Ove (Rolf Lassgård, in a career-defining performance) is a curmudgeonly fifty-nine-year-old widower whose wife Sonja has died six months ago and who is methodically attempting to follow her, interrupted, each time, by the Iranian-born neighbour Parvaneh (Bahar Pars) who has just moved in across the street and refuses to leave him alone. Across the months that follow, Parvaneh's family draws Ove out of his grief, while flashbacks reveal the slow accumulation of love and loss that produced him.

Lassgård, previously best known internationally as the original Wallander, calibrates Ove's bristling exterior and underlying tenderness with extraordinary precision. The film's emotional architecture (sentimental in synopsis, earned in execution) is a model of how the underdog-redemption story can still work when the screenplay refuses every shortcut.