Vague Visages’ The Remarkable Life of Ibelin review contains minor spoilers. Benjamin Ree’s 2024 Netflix documentary features Mats Steen, Thomas Stene-Johansen and Jessica Carroll. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Above anything else, The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin is a documentary character study reverse engineered for the audience to project their own digital experiences and relationships onto. At the surface level, Benjamin Ree’s 2024 documentary — now streaming on Netflix — is an account of the life of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who was housebound for the final decade of his life due to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The degenerative condition left him unable to do little else but spend time online, where he found friendships and community with people he did not know in physical reality via World of Warcraft. Mats’ parents were unaware of this, assuming he lived a sad and lonely life up until his untimely death in 2014, at the age of 25, when tributes came pouring in from all over the world from people whose lives their son enriched, even though they never saw or heard him. Very few were even aware of Mats’ disability and knew him solely through his elusive avatar Ibelin, named after Orlando Bloom’s protagonist in Ridley Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom Of Heaven.

The circumstances couldn’t be more specific, but Ree’s film aims to tug on the heartstrings and attain tearjerker status by painting Mats’ relationships with as broad a brush as possible, minimizing the overriding conditions of his life wherever possible to try make a universal statement on friendship and romance in the digital age. What should be a highly specific coming-of-age story, told largely within the confines of the Warcraft video game, seems more eager to explore the ways in which Mats had a more conventional teenage experience than one might assume over how these teen trials and tribulations were affected by the limitations of his condition. 

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Ree, whose parents were close friends of the Steen family when he was a toddler, clearly has noble intentions in his attempts to try and overlook the ways in which even Mats’ own parents viewed him — at best, lonely, and at worst, a victim — to showcase the richness of his interior life. But when taking place largely within a virtual world, there are large stretches with little dramatic intrigue due to his focus on the most conventional aspects of the teenage experience, from first loves to major friendship fall-outs. Even when taking place behind a screen, with the various parties never getting to meet in real life, these moments play out with little in the way of novelty.

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The director was able to construct his narrative thanks to 40,000 pages of conversation transcripts from his Warcraft team’s servers, as well as blog posts Mats published in the final years of his life. The moments where his own words speak for themselves, allowing him to discuss his life and condition with dry humor and poignance — with the assistance of a disabled voice actor — are the film’s richest, touching on the specifics of coming of age while living with a life-shortening disability with the unique perspective the rest of the film lacks. Given that Mats disclosed his illness to very few people within the virtual world during his lifetime over fear of rejection, he was regarded at face value as an awkward but endlessly empathetic character who was easy to confide in, and is only remembered by his friends there in this light. Perhaps this is a flaw with making The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin as a talking head documentary. Since most people only regarded Mats with their in-built perceptions, very little can be said that feels true or specific to his tragically short life.

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Ree has spoken at length — including, I should note, to me — about his difficulties during the editing process, as test audiences rejected earlier cuts that leaned more heavily on the video game perspective. This is how he arrived at using coming-of-age narrative conventions as his gateway into a world alien to mainstream audiences, prioritizing this emotionally universal entry point to keep viewers invested in Mats’ online story. I can’t pretend his approach hasn’t worked, with the film receiving prestigious nominations for documentary awards, alongside breathless reviews written from behind teary eyes. But I can’t help but feel dissatisfied by a film which tries to make a short, tragic life conform to played-out genre conventions for the sake of making an audience find it easier to identify with them. There are moments of richness in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, but they only materialize when Ree allows his tale to be told from the only truly lived-in perspective.

Netflix released The Remarkable Life of Ibelin on October 25, 2024.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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