A Man Called Otto
★★ 1/2
A Man Called Otto really, really, really wants to make you cry. The film pulls every lever it can find from start to finish, determined to shake loose a tear or two. And here is the strange part: I am an easy crier. I can tear up at a well-timed commercial or a cheesy sitcom moment without shame. I have a tender heart. Yet somehow, A Man Called Otto never got me there.
That is especially odd because this is exactly the kind of film I usually fall hard for. It is a character study about a lonely man in a tight knit community who gradually starts to see the world as something larger than his own frustrations. It is a great setup, and I enjoyed pieces of it. The performances are strong, the emotional beats are clear, and the themes are solid. But something never fully clicked.
I think part of it comes down to the casting. Tom Hanks is, of course, Tom Hanks. He is wonderful at what he does. But because he is so familiar, you know exactly where the character is going the moment he appears on screen. Hanks playing a grumpy widower practically guarantees that he will soften by the final act. It is not his fault; we simply have decades of history with him that make it hard to buy into Otto as a man who could stay closed off forever. He does a good job in the role, but the baggage of being Tom Hanks works against him in surprising ways.
On the flip side, Mariana Treviño is the real spark of this movie. She plays Otto’s new neighbor, a woman who is unafraid to challenge him, call him out and draw him back into the world. I first saw her in the Apple TV series Shrinking with Owen Wilson, and she shines here too. She brings warmth and energy into every scene she is in and feels like the film’s true heartbeat.
Where things fell apart for me was in how the movie delivers its backstory. We spend a lot of time in flashbacks to young Otto and his late wife, and while nothing is inherently wrong with them, they never feel like genuine memories. They play out as clean, chronological scenes rather than the messy fragments a grieving person would actually recall. Director Marc Forster and the writers do not fully trust the audience to piece things together, and the result feels overly neat.
There is also the film’s central plot thread: Otto repeatedly attempts to end his life. I understand what the movie is trying to explore about grief, loneliness and despair, but I never believed this character would jump to that conclusion. He is a man of order and routine, and the film does not convincingly bridge the gap between that structure and the leaps he takes. I am not saying the topic is out of bounds. It just never felt grounded in who Otto is.
By no means is A Man Called Otto a bad movie. It starts strong and had me immediately interested. But at almost two hours, it wears itself out by the time it reaches its very predictable conclusion. Maybe that is the real issue: I always knew exactly where it was heading, and the movie never surprised me along the way.
Still, Mariana Treviño is wonderful. And sometimes, a familiar story told with kindness is enough. It just did not quite get under my skin the way it hoped to.
