01
Mr. Nobody
Why this pick
Van Dormael again turns one man’s life into a playful, emotionally searching maze of alternate memories and imagined paths, balancing melancholy with visual invention.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1991 1h 31m BEL
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Toto the Hero
Drama
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Toto the Hero, try these.
01
02
The Science of Sleep
Why this pick
Its handmade surrealism lets fantasy continually seep into ordinary life, with an endearingly unstable point of view and the same wistful sense of childhood imagination enduring into adulthood.
03
The Bothersome Man
Why this pick
A deadpan, gently uncanny near-future fable about alienation and a life that feels wrong, delivered with precise visual wit rather than conventional sci-fi explanation.
04
The Sweet Hereafter
Why this pick
Its non-linear movement through grief and recollection gradually reshapes how small moments are understood, with a restrained melancholy akin to Toto’s meditation on a whole life.
05
Providence
Why this pick
An aging writer’s memories, resentments, and fictions merge into a formally intricate portrait of a life being revised from the inside, at once caustic, tender, and dreamlike.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
Ostensibly set in the near future, the film tells the life story of an elderly man named Thomas Van Hasebroeck (who has dubbed himself Toto, after a childhood fantasy), looking back on his ordinary, apparently uneventful life in a complex mosaic of flashback (literary technique)s, interspersed with dream sequence about how events might have turned out differently. It is not always possible to tell the difference between embellished or manufactured memories and fantasies, as Thomas is a very unreliable narrator, but some scenes (such as the narrative thread that features Toto as a espionage) are definitely fantasized.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Michel Bouquet
Thomas, as an old man
Gisela Uhlen
Evelyne as an old woman
Peter Böhlke
Alfred as an old man
Hugo Harold-Harrison
Alfred, as a child