THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF IBELIN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2024

Video games can often look like solitary affairs, because they often are, and at the start of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, that appearance of isolation takes on a tragic air. This is the story of Mats Steen, a young man from Oslo who was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy at an early age. Home videos show the course of Steen's life and the disease, which unstoppably deteriorated the muscles of his body for the 25 years of his life.

By the end, he was in a wheelchair, required multiple assistants around the clock to help him, and could only move his fingers. The movement was enough to operate a custom-made mouse, and that was all Steen needed to play one particular video game that would become the centerpiece of his life for years.

Steen's parents, Robert and Trude, and his sister Mia watched this unfold, and they could only see and feel loss. The ability for Steen to go out degraded with his muscles, and his near-complete immersion into this digital realm only emphasized how much of everyday life and how many significant moments the young man had missed and, by that point, would never experience.

When Steen died, the family could only think of what didn't happen in his life because of his condition and his obsession with the game. They only knew what they saw, but Steen left his family his password to a blog he had been writing during his final years. After they posted a message announcing Steen's death on that website, the family was stunned by an unexpected response. Emails from complete strangers came and kept coming—short messages of condolence and lengthy essays detailing how much Steen changed multiple people's lives.

That's the starting point of Benjamin Ree's documentary, which is a biography of Steen. However, it's not one told from the perspective of what people saw of him in the real world. It's one that mostly exists in the virtual realm of the game "World of Warcraft," in which Steen role-played the part of "Ibelin," a private investigator in a fantasy realm of forests, mountains, castles, villages, and creatures to fight and defeat. It was also a place where other people behind digital avatars were doing the same fundamental thing as Steen: looking to escape from the difficulties of reality for extended periods of time.

It's little wonder that all of these people connected, but they did connect—as gamers doing in-world missions and playing their parts in this realm, yes, but also on a personal level. Steen became part of a guild in the game and made friends without seeing their faces or hearing their voices for a long period of time. Meanwhile, they admired, looked up to, sought encouragement from, and even worried about the man behind "Ibelin," even though they didn't know anything about Steen or his life beyond the personality he put forward through text chats in the game.

That personality, though, was something—warm, thoughtful, insightful, compassionate, and, yes, clearly hiding something that prevented him from becoming closer to these teammates-turned-friends. They wanted to know him, really talk to him, and even meet him in person one day, because "Ibelin" helped them through crises and states of depression and family conflicts that seemed overwhelming and insurmountable alone. "Ibelin" was there for them, though, without asking for or wanting anything in return.

This is the story Ree tells—an uplifting one about a young man who found more than an escape from reality in a video game. The novelty of the documentary, though, is in how the filmmakers present that story, which lets us see and hear from the various people behind the video game avatars, of course, but primarily puts us into the view Steen had of this virtual world and his friends within it.

Much of this, in other words, is animated, using models and assets from "World of Warcraft" to bring Steen's digital biography to life. There is a whole biography here, because the guild kept an archive of the all the online interactions, by way of text and voice chat and emotes (little animated bits the characters do to express themselves physically). From Steen's time in the game, the filmmakers were given access to tens of thousands of pages of these conversations and virtual gestures.

The result is a lovely story that counters the viewpoint some might have had of Steen just by looking at him in the real world. In reality, he saw himself as ignored or a subject of pity, according to his blog posts, but in "World of Warcraft," he could play the part of the kind of person he wanted to be. In his interactions with these friends, though, Steen revealed the kind of person he actually was, if people could look past his disability and simply see him. "Ibelin" started as a kind of dream persona, but as his thousands of hours in the game progressed, the character became a way to socialize with others and communicate what was in his mind and heart to those who genuinely wanted to know and cared about him.

The gimmicky form of Ree's film, then, becomes more than a mere gimmick. We come to see Steen through his avatar and how his in-game behavior evolves with his friendships, as well as his fear of his condition being discovered, lest those friends start to see him the way he believes everyone in the real world perceives him. There's plenty to mourn from the very start of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, but by the end, we feel Steen's loss as the multifaceted person he truly was.

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