126 min | PG-13 | December 30, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
Otto Anderson is a widower who has decided he is done living. A new family moves in across the street and keeps interrupting his suicide. Tom Hanks plays the most likable misanthrope alive, which is the whole problem.
Otto Anderson runs his suburban townhouse complex like a petty dictator. He polices parking, audits the recycling, and confronts anyone who breaks a rule. His wife is dead and he plans to join her. A Man Called Otto is an English-language remake of the Swedish film A Man Called Ove, and it is about a grieving man who keeps getting pulled back from the ledge by neighbors who refuse to leave him alone. The film knows exactly where it is going from the first scene, and it goes there.
Tom Hanks plays Otto with a clenched jaw and a permanent scowl that never feels dangerous. He is too warm an actor to convince anyone that this man would actually go through with it. Mariana Trevino plays Marisol, the pregnant neighbor who adopts Otto whether he wants it or not, and she is the only live wire in the movie. She talks over his objections and hands him her kids and refuses to register his contempt. Their scenes have a real comic rhythm because Trevino plays Marisol as a person and not a plot device. Hanks does the heavy emotional work in flashback, where his real-life son Truman Hanks plays the young Otto, and the seams show.
Marc Forster directs from a script by David Magee, and the structure telegraphs every beat. Each suicide attempt cuts to a flashback that explains the grief, and the cross-cutting turns tragedy into a tidy mechanism. The film is shot in flat, overcast suburban light that flattens the emotional register instead of deepening it. Thomas Newman’s score swells on cue to tell you when to feel things. The villain is a faceless real estate company, which lets the movie point its anger somewhere safe and abstract.
The film wants credit for confronting suicide and grief while smoothing both into comfort. Every hard edge in the premise gets sanded down until the story lands exactly where you expect. Otto’s transformation is never in doubt, so the journey carries no weight. There is a sharper film inside this one about a man who genuinely wants to die and a stranger who genuinely saves him. This version is content to be a warm bath.