On its surface, the 2022 tear-jerker A Man Called Otto—directed by Marc Forster, starring Tom Hanks, and based on the 2012 Swedish bestseller A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman—is a progressive, antiracist, and disability-friendly story. Set in a warm multicultural neighborhood, the movie tells the story of how community and care draw Otto back into life from multiple suicide attempts in the wake of his wife’s death. Otto’s wife Sonya had become a wheelchair user after a bus accident very early in their marriage, and had been a beloved teacher and community member, a “force of nature.” The movie seems to celebrate the way the neighbors look out for each other—their interdependence—and to include disability as just another variation of human being. 

But much as the film’s antiracist veneer is cracked by the white savior narrative that develops by the end of the movie, the anti-ableist surface is thin and brittle. Beneath the surface, creating internal inconsistency in the movie’s plot, is a devastatingly ableist message: that years lived with disability simply don’t count. This message is rampant in not only popular culture but in discourses of public health and bioethics, where the idea that years lived with disability are “lost” years is given official imprimatur by its own acronyms: DALY, disability-adjusted life years and YLD, years lost to disability. A Man Called Otto is all the more frustrating for conveying this message so powerfully beneath its ostensibly inclusive plot.   

The movie is filled with flashbacks to Otto’s early life with Sonya, but there is only one scene where Sonya is in a wheelchair, and it is right after she is released from the hospital following the bus accident. This scene is included to showcase Otto’s anger about the neighborhood’s inaccessibility. Otto is absolutely justified in demanding access in the neighborhood, and the moviemakers’ inclusion of this scene is important. But even this scene of disability advocacy is all about Otto. Sonya sits silently next to him as he criticizes the neighborhood council and then becomes enraged, attacking one of the council members. What sets him off is the phrase “people like your wife.” Otto is rightfully angry that the man is dismissing his wife and suggesting she should live somewhere else. But at the same time, he seems outraged that his wife should be grouped with other disabled people. In this way the movie undermines the one moment when it focuses on accessibility, detaching Otto’s demands from principles of collective disability access.

But far more important than that scene is the fact that there are no other scenes where Sonya is in a wheelchair. All of Otto’s memories of her, with the exception of a single close shot of him holding a thin hand, are from the brief portion of their marriage that preceded the bus accident. This is a striking omission considering that at the beginning of the movie, Sonya has only died 6 months previously. Her tombstone, shown several times, indicates that she lived until age 63. But although Otto is devastated by the loss, there are no representations of Sonya during the many years between her early 20s, when she became disabled, and her death. The disabled years are simply not shown.

Where is this force of nature Otto is mourning? Where is the caring woman who was the first to accept a trans student and make them feel validated? Film is a visual artform, but in A Man Called Otto we are told, but never shown, how wonderful Sonya was. This absence suggests that Otto’s idealized vision of Sonya cannot (for the moviemakers) include her being in a wheelchair—as if happy memories and disability cannot coexist. Even though this is contrary to the rest of the plot, in which Otto and Sonya had a long and happy marriage, the movie is tripped up by its own ableism; it ends up suggesting that all of those roughly 40 years were “years lost to disability.” A shot of a folded-up wheelchair in Sonya’s study is an apt symbol of the absence of Sonya’s disabled body, the movie’s failure to even superficially represent the lovely life Otto ostensibly had with Sonya in all the years since she became disabled.

In a review of the movie in The Wrap, Robert Abele describes Otto as a “widower of many years” even though Otto says “she died 6 months ago” and only a few years pass during the movie (time can be measured by Marisol’s pregnancy and the age of her youngest child in the final shots). Abele’s mistake is understandable, even solicited by the movie’s failure to represent any scenes from that long marriage. And most telling of all, this erasure of disabled lives is evidenced by the fact that while there are two or more actors playing Otto and their friends Anita and Reuben at different ages, there is no actor playing an older Sonya. Here the misogyny that insists female love interests be young and the ableism that insists they be able to run along train platforms, as Sonya does in the flashbacks, come together to communicate to viewers that disabled years aren’t years, disabled lives aren’t lives.

A Man Called Otto’s failure to represent disability as part of a well-lived life might serve as an invitation to those who use bioethical phrasings such as “disability-adjusted life years,” “years lost to disability,” “reduction in quality life-years,” and the like, to reconsider what they are implying about disabled people, their lives, and their value. And at the least, it should invite viewers to demand that disability be understood as a form of human variation, one that should be fully included in a movie that purports to celebrate interdependence and community.