O’ Horten

IN RECENT years, quirkiness has, quite understandably, got itself something of a bad name. Far too many independent American comedies trade in a kind of off-the-peg zany anarchy that long ago congealed into its own desperately overworked genre.

Hooray for the divinely named Bent Hamer. In his earlier Kitchen Storiesand, now, with the delightful O' Horten, the Norwegian director proves that an original mind can still discover fresh and exciting things to do with the q-word.

O’ Horten details a dedicated train engineer’s last day on the job and the hilarious, sometimes tragic chaos that his retirement brings on. Odd Horten (yes, that’s his name) goes out to celebrate on the night before his final journey, but, locked out of his friends’ party, he ends up breaking into an occupied apartment and spending an uneasy evening in a child’s bedroom. Arriving late to work, he watches as the train – with 40 years of his life on board – chugs away into the snowy distance.

A series of quietly outlandish adventures then follow. Some are broadly comic: Odd Horten loses his shoes in a swimming pool and has to steal a pair of high-heeled boots. Others are heartbreaking: he visits his senile mother in a retirement home. Through it all, Bård Owe, an actor whose every feature droops with poignancy, wears a look of stoic detachment that would cause even Buster Keaton to tip his porkpie hat.

Shot with an unexcited limpidity, this subdued film is deliberately slippery about time. Being largely disconnected, the vignettes can be reassembled in different orders to lend the drama various contrasting tones.

Most viewers, charmed by the hero, will, surely, choose to view the ambiguous ending as a cautious repudiation of the comic despair that has gone before, and elect to leave the cinema chortling wryly. Confirmed miserablists do, however, have the option of viewing it as confirmation that everything, everywhere is unimaginably awful.

Directed by Bent Hamer. Starring Bård Owe, Espen Skjønberg, Ghita Nørby, Henny Moan Club, IFI, Dublin, 90 min