Deep community

You wouldn’t expect one of the most charming, heartwarming films in recent memory to center on a man repeatedly trying to commit suicide. You also wouldn’t expect one of the loveliest portraits of the Christian virtue of hospitality to come out of one of the world’s most secular countries. And yet, 2015’s Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, based on the international bestseller of the same name, is all these things.

Ove (tremendously played by Rolf Lassgård) is a thoroughly unlikable old coot. When he’s not leaving his neighbors nasty notes for minor HOA infractions, he’s berating them with profanity-laced insults (hence the PG-13 rating). The whole world is made up of “idiots,” according to Ove.

Rather than suffer the slings and arrows of his idiotic neighbors any further, he decides to join his beloved wife in the afterlife. With each failed attempt to kill himself (the idiots interfering again), we get to know a little more about Ove in flashback. What we learn is that he’s also a man who will endure any inconvenience for someone he loves. The problem is he doesn’t love enough people. The rest of the film sets about rectifying this, gently, joyfully illustrating that a meaningful life is one lived in deep community with others.

Again and again the needs of Ove’s neighbors prod him out of his comfortable nest of despair. First it’s an Iranian immigrant who wants to learn to drive. Then it’s a paraplegic with a broken heater. Later, it’s a teen who’s been kicked out of his house for announcing he’s gay.

I read a review by one Christian critic that cited this last as a negative. I understand that reasoning, but for discerning adult viewers, I’d challenge it. Unlike so many other movies, A Man Called Ove doesn’t celebrate the teen’s revelation. We never know whether Ove approves or disapproves. All we know is that despite how utterly different they are, Ove opens his home to the boy.

As Rosario Butterfield writes in her book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, Christ-like hospitality recoils from reducing a human being to a label. And it summons those who don’t yet know the Lord into fellowship. In this respect, I’d suggest the film offers a model for redeemed behavior rather than something we need to avert our eyes from.

If there’s a villain here, it’s a group Ove calls the “white shirts”—nameless bureaucrats who continually wreak havoc on private lives with their authoritarianism. When a government worker ominously tells the wife of the paraplegic “a decision has been made” to take her husband away to make her life easier, she asks, “What kind of love would that be, to part when you need one another the most?” The scene further echoes recent headlines when the bureaucrat wrongly, but with complete administerial arrogance, insists her husband isn’t aware of his surroundings.

It could be a coincidence, but given Sweden’s reputation as the least religious nation in the Western world, it’s surprising how often churches and images that subtly allude to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam pop up throughout the film. In the context of a funeral service, Ove’s simple observation that “no one gets out of this world alive” illustrates as clearly as any scene on film Solomon’s words that it is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting. Because mourning teaches us to measure our lives and reflect on their worth. Which is exactly what the arc of this story does.

I know there are plenty of people for whom a subtitled film feels like a homework assignment, so I don’t recommend them lightly. I only do it when they’re so good they make you forget you’re reading. A Man Called Ove is one of those. It’s so good, Tom Hanks bought the rights to produce and star in an American version. But that won’t hit theaters for at least a few years. Some regrettable language notwithstanding, you won’t want to wait that long to enjoy this gem.