‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ review: Amazing documentary about the inner life of a ‘World of Warcraft’ player

The Wonderful Life of Ibelin combines traditional documentation techniques with Military World painting an emotional portrait of the Norwegian gamer.

The film, directed by Benjamin Ree, focuses on 25-year-old Mats Steen, who died in 2014 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. His parents, Robert and Trude, initially had a negative view of Mats’ life. It seems to them that Mats has been aloof and spends most of his time playing, so Robert and Trude are concerned that he hasn’t connected with anyone. However, after announcing Mats’ passing on his old blog, they received more support revealing that Mats lived a rich, loving life in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Military Worldwhere he played an actress named Ibelin Redmoore.

What The Wonderful Life of Ibelin about?

The Wonderful Life of Ibelin first he introduces us to Mats with Robert and Trude’s home videos. Important life moments play out at a fast pace: Mats as a newborn, Mats on his first day at school. As his dystrophy manifests itself and worsens, we also see images of him falling and trying to get up, followed by videos of him using a wheelchair, and even timed out playing for hours at a time. Through it all, Robert and Trude bemoan what they see as his distance from those around him, wishing he could have done more.

But when Robert and Trude start receiving emails from Mats’ Wow friends, The Wonderful Life of Ibelin it kicks into a new gear. It rewinds — literally — and shows us everything we just saw from Mats’ perspective, complete with posts from his blog, “Musings of Life,” read aloud by the actor. Often, these voiceovers play home videos we’ve already seen, allowing Mats to lend his voice to the story in an important way.

The biggest change here is the inclusion of recreated scenes from Mats’ Wow gameplay, extracted from over 42,000 pages of game logs. As these animated scenes play out, taking over from tried and true documentary tools like talking heads and home videos, Ree immerses us fully in Mats’ perspective. It is an active change in form: Whenever we enter Wow respectively, we know that we are getting closer to the true story of Mats.

The Wonderful Life of Ibelin proves the power of internet spaces.

It’s animated Wow In the scenes, we see Mats as Ibelin interacting with an online community, a role-playing group known as Starlight. This interaction goes beyond completing quests and slaying dragons, however. At one point, Mats made an in-game romance that spread to the real world. In another, he helps a mother reconnect with her autistic son. Among the animated Wow scenes and interviews with members of Starlight, we get a picture of Mats as kind, compassionate, and actively engaging in the kind of relationship that Robert and Trude wanted for him – just online.

That virtual environments can have a real-world impact is undeniable at this point, so The Wonderful Life of Ibelin‘s the assessment of that fact is true, if not tragic. However, as someone with an admittedly small view of Wow – another turning to toxic superstitions – Ree’s observation of Mats’ niche community is a moving example. Like Robert and Trude, the revelation of Mats’ inner life challenged my assumptions about games as a communication tool.

The Wonderful Life of Ibelin it saves Mats’s family life too Wow life is very different, reflecting his knowledge and the experiences of those who knew him. Just as his parents didn’t know much about his playing life, his friends in the Starlight team initially didn’t know much about his private life, as Mats kept quiet about it.

However, both groups come together in the surprising final moments of the film, featuring a memory that will touch your heart and bring out many tears. It’s incredibly intimate, and more The Wonderful Life of Ibelinit serves as a touching tribute to what Mats meant to so many people, and the power of the physical ties that bind us.

The Wonderful Life of Ibelin reviewed outside of Fantastic Fest. Coming to Netflix Oct. 25.