{"id":649096,"date":"2026-06-20T14:49:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/649096\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T14:49:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T14:49:09","slug":"the-remarkable-life-of-ibelin-netflixs-most-underrated-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/649096\/","title":{"rendered":"The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: Netflix’s Most Underrated Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best documentary film I\u2019ve seen in the last two years is not one I hear much about, even though it was shortlisted for a 2025 Oscar <\/a>and has a whopping 97% critic\u2019s score<\/a> on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. Its audience score is only 2% lower at 95%.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also won multiple Sundance awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, available on Netflix<\/a> in the UK, follows a Norwegian gamer (Mats Steen) with a progressive muscular disease. <\/p>\n

He lives a double life. There\u2019s the outside world, where his rare condition \u2013 Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which occurs in<\/a> about 1 in 3,500 male births worldwide \u2013 places increasing limits on his physical ability. <\/p>\n

Then, there\u2019s his online World of Warcraft persona, who\u2019s muscularly handsome and incredibly popular. <\/p>\n

When a tragedy occurs, his family log into the young adult\u2019s blog, where they know he updated his followers on life with his condition.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Life Of Iberlin<\/p>\n

Netflix \/ World Of Wonder via Blizzard Entertainment<\/p>\n

To their amazement, this opens the doors to a life that had been invisible to them: Mats\u2019 vast, sprawling, complex online reality, a world in which he\u2019d spend hours every day.<\/p>\n

After that point, the documentary delivers the most innovative and touching retrospective I\u2019ve seen. In gamer-style pixelated reenactments, they trace the young adult\u2019s digital journey through romances, heartbreaks (many caused by Mats), and lasting friendships. <\/p>\n

This is made possible by a goldmine of archived World of Warcraft information, including actual conversations held between Mats and his community. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Reality is complicated. Online gatherings become in-person in meetings, which sometimes causes issues. Real life affects Mat\u2019s online persona when his body begins to struggle to move in a manner necessary for gaming; both worlds are both.<\/p>\n

It is to the documentary makers\u2019 credit that they refuse to dismiss either in this often-funny, boundary-breaking, well-considered film. It\u2019ll make you ugly-sob and snort-laugh (at least, it did me).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to leave without being thankful we got to see the world through Mat\u2019s eyes \u2013 both the blinking and watery kind and their digitised counterparts\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The best documentary film I\u2019ve seen in the last two years is not one I hear much about,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,392,18685,56,54,55,14914],"class_list":["post-649096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-netflix","tag-rotten-tomatoes","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-what-to-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}