O' Horten - Plot

Plot

Odd Horten is an overly cautious 67-year-old man about to retire after forty years as a train driver on the route between Oslo and Bergen. As he awakes, he goes through a meticulous daily routine, as he prepares for his second-to-last time driving the train to Bergen. When he gets there, he makes small talk with Svea, who owns the boarding house where he stays when there and whom he now may never see again.

Back in Oslo, his colleagues throw him a farewell party, but Odd—a timid man—is uncomfortable with the attention. As the party moves to a co-worker's apartment, he ends up getting accidentally locked out. He climbs up a scaffold, trying to reach the apartment window, and ends up in a young boy's room. The boy asks him to stay and wait for him to fall asleep, but Odd falls asleep first. He oversleeps in the unfamiliar room and arrives too late for the train he was to drive on his final working day. He is left standing on the platform without any fixed points in his life, with nothing but a life of emptiness stretching out before him.

A number of scenes then follow whose exact sequence is unclear. Odd goes to visit his mother at the retirement home, which only makes him more unhappy: his mother is senile and spends her days staring emptily out the window, and the visit reminds him of his own impending old age. While Odd is at a restaurant, police come in and arrest the cook. At the shop where he normally buys his pipe tobacco, he learns that the owner has died. He decides to sell his boat, leading to misadventures when the buyer, who works at an airport, asks Odd to meet him there inside the secure zone. Odd goes to the local swimming pool, but his shoes were removed when the facility closed; as he is leaving, he finds a pair of red high-heeled boots and walks away in them.

By chance he then runs into another man his age, the far more spontaneous Trygve Sissener, who has fallen asleep in the snow-covered street. The two spend the evening in conversation over a few drinks at Sissener's house, and Odd is led to realisations about his own life. It emerges that his mother—a free-spirited woman—was a ski jumper, but Odd himself never had the courage to try the sport. He now feels as if he has let her down, by never having the courage to seize the day and try new things.

In the early morning Sissener suggests the two go driving blindfolded. The stunt goes surprisingly well, but as Sissener pulls over the car, he dies. Odd is now left with responsibility for Sissener's dog and with an urgency to live life to the fullest. He makes his way up to the Holmenkollen ski jump, where he sees a vision of his mother as a young woman, doing the jump. He comes to a decision and starts to do the ski jump. Odd, for the first time no longer wearing his railwayman's jacket, rides the train to Bergen, where Svea is happily waiting for him on the platform.