Review-The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

True friends can sometimes come from unexpected places

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The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is one of those films that impacts the viewer so deeply that they can’t help but continue thinking about it days after watching. It may be that this film struck right at half a dozen of my core memories in life, but I felt like it was meant for me from beginning to end.

Mats Steen is the subject of Benjamin Ree’s incredible documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

Benjamin Ree’s Netflix documentary tells the story of Mats Steen, a young man from Norway who was born with a degenerative muscular disease and sadly passed away in 2014 at the age of 25. He lived most of his life in a wheelchair, and when he couldn’t go outside and play with other children, he escaped into digital worlds of video games, eventually devoting many hours each day to playing online in World of Warcraft. And that’s the film…at least as it is told in the first 15-20 minutes.

Therein lies the genius of this film. It starts as a very simple story about a boy who had this terrible disease, his family’s quest to make him as happy and comfortable as possible, and some of the games he played to have fun. But once the story reaches Mats’s passing, there is a quick rewind and suddenly the world of the film is blown wide open. The creators used actual game models of characters from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game to create animated sequences that tell the story of Mats’s in game character Ibelin. These sequences are overlaid with lines of dialog voiced by actors, but taken from actual game chats between Mats and his online friends.

Not only are these scenes in the game beautiful, but they introduce us to others who knew Mats only by his online avatar, the burly Ibelin who’s habit of running through the game world every morning speaks to Mats’s desire for the freedom to do that in the real world. Ibelin was a respected member of an in game guild called Starlight and was often found helping those around him. Several of them are interviewed for the film and repeatedly speak about how their lives would have been much different if not for the help they received from Mats/Ibelin.