O'Horten DVD by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment - Award-Winning Norwegian Comedy Film for Movie Nights & Home Entertainment

.... unless you're Scandinavian. No, limit that to Norwegian or Swedish, or Minnesotan. Even a Dane wouldn't crack a smile at most of the quirky humor of "O'Horten". But it doesn't matter so much. It isn't really a comedy, though it's advertised as such. It's a wry, tender lament about getting old ... or wait! perhaps it's a deliberate propaganda ploy from the welfare state intended to discourage workers from retirement before they've become decrepit and senile! What is there for old Odd Horten, forty years a railroad engineer, to do with himself on his modest pension except to contemplate the things he's never had the nerve or the means to do? Horten is gentle, reserved, reliable, stiff, meek, an observer rather than a partaker. His health is good. His mother is still alive, probably in her nineties, a one-time ski jumper, now a placid wordless window-sitter in an old folks' home, whom Horten visits faithfully, lovingly. Horten seems never to have married; he is scarcely more alone after retirement than he's always been, but he has more occasion to notice his loneliness."O'Horten" is beautifully acted. Beautifully filmed. Heart-achingly real, slow and still, yet concisely edited. Old age is also mostly slow and still but not so artfully edited. You won't enjoy it much but you'll find it touching. Old age, I mean, not the movie. The movie has to be viewed as art, not entertainment.The actor who plays Horten has a face with more wrinkles than a field of cracked lava. Horten is supposed to be sixty-seven years old. One year younger than I am. Scary. I'll be shaving without a mirror tomorrow morning.