I can buy Tom Hanks in a lot of roles. Mentally challenged? Sure. Man pretending to be a woman to score an apartment? Why not. But a convincing grumpy old bastard? That's a stretch. That's like asking Sean Penn to play someone brilliant. Hanks would need something spectacular—like a full Mel Gibson DUI meltdown—to make me believe he's capable of real curmudgeonry. To me, he's always been more George Clooney than grizzled misanthrope: pleasant enough, but not a reason to see (or skip) a movie. In A MAN CALLED OTTO, Hanks imitates a grumpy man without ever fully inhabiting the role. Still, he does a serviceable job with imperfect material, because even I'm not completely immune to that trademark Hanks charm.
The charm covers for more than Hanks's performance. A MAN CALLED OTTO keeps choosing the version of Otto's life with less friction in it, scene after scene. In the book, Ove is sixteen when his father is killed by a runaway railway carriage. He tells his school he'll be back in two weeks. He never returns. He works the railway for five years before Sonja asks what he'd want out of life, and he answers, without thinking, that he'd like to build houses. She doesn't laugh — she gets angry that he's done nothing about it — and days later she's back with brochures for a correspondence course in engineering: less a gift than a dare. The movie keeps the milestone and drops the dare. A "CLASS of '78" banner, a cap and gown, Sonya reading his diploma aloud in the car, in the same beat where he proposes. The funeral gets the same flattening. Ove's instructions are absolute — "No people. No messing about!" — and the book's payoff is that nobody listens: more than three hundred mourners show up anyway, a scale of defiance the story needs to make its point. Otto asks for "nothing overblown" instead, and receives exactly that, no defiance required. A correspondence course became a cap and gown. A funeral nobody wanted became a service everybody agreed to.
What Otto owns isn't the only thing that gets revised. Who he's allowed to be does too. In the book, Ove spends years as chairman of the Residents' Association, with Rune — vice-chairman, eventual Volvo man — at his side, until a steering committee votes him out over a fight about trash-room surveillance cameras. He calls it "the coup d'état." Years later, a different camera system comes up for a vote, and Ove is the only one who votes against it, distrustful of anything connected to the internet. The movie keeps the shape of the story — Homeowner's Association, a coup, a vote — but swaps out the mess. Otto is voted out for standing up for wheelchair access for his disabled wife, after a developer tells him "there's places for people like your wife." He shoves the man. And the neighbor who replaces him isn't a committee, it's Reuben, one specific friend, so an institutional grievance becomes a personal betrayal instead. Ove's version stays messy, and occasionally wrong. Otto's stays clean enough to still be right about it, out loud, on his own street.
Even the cars follow this rule. Ove and Rune spend their whole friendship trading upgrades — a Saab 96 against a Volvo 244 when they first move in, a Saab 9000i against a Volvo 760 decades later — one-upmanship neither of them ever calls off. Ove's last car is a blue Saab 9-5. Not long after he buys it, General Motors buys up the remaining Swedish shares in the company, and Ove spends an afternoon swearing about it, then vows never to drive an American car again for the rest of his life. Everything built since, he decides, is "like driving a computer." Otto inherits his loyalty instead of earning it: his father teaches him what makes a Chevy engine run, calls it "Dependable," and years later, telling Sonya the same story on their first dinner date, Otto ends on the identical word. No rivalry, no argument. Only inheritance. Near the end, Otto buys himself a new truck — an actual 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV, a model that didn't exist yet when his own tombstone says he died — and takes Marisol's family for a ride in it. General Motors is the villain of one version of this story and the retirement gift in the other. Commercially convenient beats internally consistent, right to the end.
The Swedish film isn't only closer to the book — it's proof the remake's choices were choices, not casualties of adaptation. Its version of the threat to Rune isn't a real estate company. It's a privatized eldercare contractor called Consensus, a name that undercuts itself a scene later, when Ove threatens to report the company and the rep falls back on corporate boilerplate: only a private contractor carrying out decisions made somewhere else, nothing personal. A reporter separately produces the company's own financial statements, thin profits despite a shareholder's stake. Dye & Merika wants a neighborhood. Consensus wants a return on investment. A school interviews Sonja for a teaching job and turns her down — no plan for a teacher with physical disabilities, they tell her. Her answer is six words: "Either we die or we live." Ove's isn't a speech. He drives to the school that night and builds a wheelchair ramp himself, alone, finished by morning. The American screenplay keeps a version of that ramp — Tommy finds it in the garage years later, mentions it in front of Otto, and Otto is furious — but it doesn't linger on the building of it. Instead, Otto tells Marisol the story as it turns toward the neighborhood's inaccessible new construction, the confrontation that gets him thrown off the board. The Swedish film doesn't need an audience for Ove's ramp. The American film needs a board to vote on it.
All three versions keep her in the same place: dead before the story starts, present only in memory, which does most of the idealizing on its own. The intervention scene repeats almost word for word across adaptations, including the Swedish line already quoted above. The American film stages the same moment, mid-suicide-attempt, with the same function: "You're angry. And sad. So am I. But now we have to live." Neither is a conversation. Both are visitations. Only the Swedish film seems to notice this is a problem. Parvaneh, who never met Sonja, tells Ove he's "made her into some kind of saint" who'd probably rather have been ordinary. Ove tells her to be quiet. The scene doesn't fix anything — Sonja never gets a moment of her own where she's simply present and unremarkable, not in this version or any other. Naming the sainthood isn't the same as undoing it. The American film doesn't even name it.
None of this makes the film empty. It means the craft is there and gets used selectively. Otto refuses to buy Sonya a crib early in their marriage and builds one himself instead. Decades later, he finds it in the attic, still wrapped in plastic, alongside a memory of a very pregnant Sonya watching him put it together. Nobody explains why he kept it sealed all this time. When he finally gives it to Marisol's family, he sets their baby inside it himself: "See? It works. You like that? Good." The connection to the child they'd once been expecting is never spoken. The cat scenes show the same confidence. Otto throws it off his bed the first night and sets it up with a towel by the door instead. By morning it's back on the bed with him, asleep, and he's holding its tail in his palm, no comment on the reversal. Later, at Sonya's grave, mid-visit, the cat comes forward on its own and rests its head against his palm. Both moments pass without a word. This is the same movie that has a character spell out the "Dye & Merika" pun and then confirm it, in case anyone missed it. The filmmakers know how to let a scene sit in silence. They don't always choose to.
The math doesn't work, and it isn't close. Sonya's side of the shared headstone gives her death as 2018, which matches the year stamped on almost every present-day scene heading in the shooting script — the whole Marisol-moves-in, HOA-ousting stretch of the story happens inside that single year. Otto's side of the same stone gives his death as 2022. Four years, and the film doesn't visibly spend them: no aging on the kids, nothing different about the block, nothing anywhere on screen arguing for time having passed at all. The tombstone changed. Everything else stayed staged for 2018. The Silverado was one prop with the wrong date. This is the whole movie with the wrong date.
Otto has a crib nobody explains sitting in the same movie as a joke that explains itself twice — real craft, present and demonstrated, used only when convenient. The whole movie keeps making the same choice, right down to a truck the timeline has no room for. Hanks didn't write any of that. He shows up for the two or three scenes that ask something real of him, and he delivers, which is more than the script consistently earns. A MAN CALLED OTTO isn't hollow. It's a film that knew how to be better and chose, over and over, not to be.
Final Verdict: 63 out of 100.
