The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: Netflix’s Most Underrated Film

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

It’s also won multiple Sundance awards.

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

He lives a double life. There’s the outside world, where his rare condition – Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which occurs in about 1 in 3,500 male births worldwide – places increasing limits on his physical ability.

Then, there’s his online World of Warcraft persona, who’s muscularly handsome and incredibly popular.

When a tragedy occurs, his family log into the young adult’s blog, where they know he updated his followers on life with his condition.

To their amazement, this opens the doors to a life that had been invisible to them: Mats’ vast, sprawling, complex online reality, a world in which he’d spend hours every day.

After that point, the documentary delivers the most innovative and touching retrospective I’ve seen. In gamer-style pixelated reenactments, they trace the young adult’s digital journey through romances, heartbreaks (many caused by Mats), and lasting friendships.

This is made possible by a goldmine of archived World of Warcraft information, including actual conversations held between Mats and his community.

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

It is to the documentary makers’ credit that they refuse to dismiss either in this often-funny, boundary-breaking, well-considered film. It’ll make you ugly-sob and snort-laugh (at least, it did me).

It’s hard to leave without being thankful we got to see the world through Mat’s eyes – both the blinking and watery kind and their digitised counterparts’.