Movies about chance and fate, such as Forrest Gump and Amelie, have to be careful that their musings don’t trip over into preciousness. Pondering the eternal what-ifs of existence—“What if I hadn’t done that one thing that sent my life into a completely different direction?”—can lead to touchy-feely observations about our interconnectedness that can feel mawkish in a film whereas, in real life, such mysteries can seem disconcerting and even frightening. So much of our lives is out of our control: Shouldn’t that fact terrify us?
What makes Mr. Nobody work so well is that Belgian writer-director Jaco Van Dormael balances both the awe and terror of that eternal mystery. This existential sci-fi drama stars Jared Leto as Nemo Nobody. Waking up one morning, Nemo discovers he’s an elderly man living in the late 21st century—and that he’s the last mortal left alive in an advanced civilization that views him as a fascinating oddity. Nemo has no memory of how he got so old—last he remembers, he was born in 1975 and living his life in the early 21st century.
The film is structured around old Nemo’s stories to a journalist who’s writing a story on him. We see much of Nemo’s younger life, but the problem is that we’re not sure which version of his life is correct. According to the old man, he either grew up in the U.K. and fell in love with a woman named Elise (Sarah Polley) or he moved with his mother to Canada and fell in love with a woman named Anna (Diane Kruger). But even those versions have their own divergent narratives: Did Nemo meet Anna as a teen (Juno Temple) and then never reconnect with her in adulthood, or did they find each other again?
This storytelling complexity is not new for Van Dormael, who helped make his name on the world stage with 1991’s Toto the Hero, which also told the story of a man’s life in flashbacks that weren’t always accurate. Fantasy and reality mix just as readily in Mr. Nobody; in one plot strand, Nemo adventures to Mars to be part of a colony, although we assume what we’re seeing is a product of Nemo’s imagination as a boy. But because Van Dormael never shows his hand regarding which version of Nemo’s life is correct or the superior option, Mr. Nobody emerges as an investigation into the different variations of all our lives: the daydreams, the anxious worst-case scenarios, and the futile digressions that went nowhere but maybe could have if events had worked out some other way.