A Man Called Otto review – excruciatingly twee remake of a Swedish crowdpleaser

Though English-language remakes of popular foreign films have become a bit less common in recent years, if there’s one New Year’s Resolution I would like cinema in 2023 to stick to, it would be to eliminate them almost entirely. Yes, 2022’s Living did a pretty astounding job transplanting Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru to London, though the same cannot be said for A Man Called Otto. A remake of 2015 Swedish crowdpleaser A Man Called Ove, Marc Forster’s excruciatingly twee dramedy is drab and pointless, mistaking quirky cutesiness for a personality and running on for an interminably long time.

Tom Hanks plays Otto, a grieving widower famous in his Pittsburgh neighbourhood for being a grouchy stickler for the rules who spends his time mostly complaining about nothing’s any good any more. Unable to imagine life without his late wife (played by Rachel Keller in flashbacks), Otto decides to kill himself, but is continuously interrupted by his new neighbours, a very friendly but impractical bunch who have just moved from Mexico and constantly need his help for DIY matters. Of course, this family, in particular the kids and their heavily pregnant mum Marisol (Mariana Trevino) end up softening Otto’s heart as he slowly becomes a local sweetheart.

The fundamental problem here lies not so much with Hanks’s perfunctorily acted Otto – though his grouchiness is mostly pretty uninteresting when the film’s observations about modern life basically start and end with “millennials and their damn phones” – but in his neighbours. Marisol is so unimpeachably bubbly and sweet that she never comes across as an actual person, a walking, talking plot device for one of the most predictable and uninspired plots you could hope to see in this or any other year. Forster and writer David Magee are aiming for an uncomplicatedly upbeat tone (even with all the suicide attempts), but the result is insufferable, building a world that is entirely unconvincing.

Feeble jokes and one-note supporting characters simply add to the emptiness that overwhelms A Man Called Otto, which is then further exacerbated by the low-ambition filmmaking at every turn. We rarely leave Otto’s street, but Forster doesn’t use this small scale to create any sort of lived-in atmosphere and the visual and music choices are bland and sappy. Meanwhile, the flashbacks are so lamely done that it borders on self-parody, every new foggy transition from present to memory unintentionally funny and the casting of Hanks’s youngest son Truman as young Otto proves a mistake. Having mostly worked in the camera department on previous films, this Hanks Jr. makes for a very off-putting actor.

A film like A Man Called Otto needs to be earnestly charming to have chance of working, but all of Forster’s ingredients here, from the precocious kids to Otto adopting a cat to an “inspiring” climactic showdown with a nasty bureaucrat, instead come off as cynical attempts at real emotions that are entirely beyond this film. 2023 may only be a few days old, but the competition for its worst – or at least most forgettable – film has started strong.

A Man Called Otto is released in UK cinemas on 6 January.