Like the character it's named for, "O'Horten" is charming and a little bit daft. The story of some days in the life of Odd Horten (a common enough name in its native Norway), this is a gentle comedy, both funny and melancholy, about a timid soul who discovers the necessity of embracing life in all its absurdity and unlooked-for joy.
"O'Horten" is the latest film by Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer, whose last film was "Factotum," the excellent Matt Dillon-starring adaptation of Charles Bukowski. But he is best known for the delicious "Kitchen Stories," a look at the lives of Norwegian bachelor farmers that has a lot in common with "O'Horten."
Like those lonely farmers, Odd Horten is a man of set habits who lives for his precise routines. As played by the veteran Baard Owe, whose career goes all the way back to Carl Theodor Dreyer's classic "Gertrud," Horten is a Norwegian bachelor train engineer with a regular run whose biggest problem is the occasional moose on the tracks.
Horten's routine is also a kind of benign straightjacket, but as long as the trains run on time and his comfortable pipe is close at hand, he doesn't notice. He seems to enjoy the company of a woman who runs a small hotel at his destination city, but the relationship has never gone beyond exchanges of small talk and smiles.
Now, however, Horten's life is about to undergo two sets of changes, one expected and one not. After 40 years on the job, he is just a few days away from mandatory retirement at age 67, and his fellow engineers, an idiosyncratic lot who spend their spare time trying to guess the sounds of specific trains, present him with the coveted Silver Locomotive.
Ordinarily, Horten would head home after the ceremony, but his brother engineers persuade him to take in a party. Horten's decision to break precedent and attend seems to trigger something in the universe, leading to an escalating series of small disruptions that get wonderfully strange.
Among the things Horten serendipitously encounters after he's freed from the moorings of job and routine are a random child who has trouble falling asleep at night, a group of airport security men who are perplexed to find him in their midst and a bemused old man who collects primitive weapons but believes "weapons are all primitive, after all." Plus someone who believes he can drive with his eyes closed, and proceeds to prove it.
