‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ review: A remarkable documentary about a ‘World of Warcraft’ player’s inner life

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin blends traditional documentary techniques with World of Warcraft recreations to paint a touching portrait of the online life of a Norwegian gamer.

The film, directed by Benjamin Ree, centers on 25-year-old Mats Steen, who died in 2014 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. His parents, Robert and Trude, initially have a fairly bleak view of Mats’ life. It seems to them that Mats was not social and spent most of his time gaming, so Robert and Trude worry he hadn’t made any meaningful connections. However, after they announce Mats’ passing on his old blog, they receive an outpouring of support that reveals Mats led a rich, love-filled life in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, where he played a character named Ibelin Redmoore.

What’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin about?

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin first introduces us to Mats through Robert and Trude’s home videos. Pivotal life moments play out at an accelerated pace: Mats as a newborn, Mats on his first day of school. As his dystrophy manifests and worsens, we also see footage of him falling and trying to get back up, followed by videos of him using a wheelchair, and even a time lapse of him gaming for hours at a time. Throughout it all, Robert and Trude lament what they see as his distance from those around him, wishing that they could have done more.

But when Robert and Trude begin to receive e-mails from Mats’ WoW friends, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin kicks into a whole new gear. It hits rewind — literally — and shows us everything we just saw from Mats’ perspective, complete with posts from his blog, “Musings of Life,” which are read aloud by an actor. Often, these voiceovers play over home video footage we’ve already seen, allowing Mats to lend his voice to the story in a crucial way.

The biggest change here is the inclusion of recreated scenes from Mats’ WoW gameplay, pulled from over 42,000 pages of gaming logs. As these animated scenes play out, taking over from more tried-and-true documentary tools like talking heads and home videos, Ree immerses us fully in Mats’ point of view. It’s an effective shift in form: Whenever we enter WoW sequences, we know we’re getting the closest we can to Mats’ true story.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin proves the power of online spaces.

In the animated WoW scenes, we see Mats as Ibelin interacting with his online community, a role-playing guild known as Starlight. These interactions go beyond completing quests and slaying dragons, though. At one point, Mats forges an in-game romance that spills into the real world. At another, he helps a mother reconnect with her autistic son. Between animated WoW scenes and interviews with members of Starlight, we get a picture of Mats as kind, empathetic, and actively engaging in the kind of relationships Robert and Trude wanted for him — just online.

That virtual spaces can have a real-world impact is undeniable at this point, so The Remarkable Life of Ibelin‘s exploration of that fact rings true, if not particularly revelatory. However, as someone with an admittedly narrow view of WoW — one that skews towards stereotypes of toxicity — Ree’s look at Mats’ niche community is a moving case study. Like with Robert and Trude, the revelation of Mats’ inner life challenged my own assumptions about gaming as a tool for connection.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin keeps Mats’ family life and WoW life mostly separate, mirroring his own experience and the experiences of those who knew him. Just as his parents didn’t know much about his gaming life, his friends in the Starlight guild didn’t initially know much about his personal life, as Mats kept fairly quiet about it.

However, both groups come together in the film’s astonishing final moments, involving a memorial that will tug at your heartstrings and cue many, many tears. It’s a remarkable closer, and along with the rest of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, it serves as a touching tribute to what Mats meant to so many people, as well as the power of the virtual ties that bind us.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was reviewed out of Fantastic Fest. It hits Netflix Oct. 25.