Almost from the start, the internet scrambled our sense of reality. You could never really know if whoever you were talking to was the person they said they were. Now it’s hard to know if they’re even a person.

This is destabilizing and frightening, and also the premise for a good movie. But there has to be more to the story than just the scary parts. No, we don’t exist physically on the internet, but our virtual selves do things that have real-world consequences, and our emotions and minds, in some phenomenological way, extend into cyberspace, too. For better or worse, the internet is a place in which we live and love and rage and mourn. We bring our humanity with us, the bad parts but also the good ones.

Movies haven’t always captured this aspect of 21st-century life well, in part because rendering the internet visually is weird and tricky. I loved Joe Hunting’s 2022 documentary “We Met in Virtual Reality,” filmed entirely inside a VR platform, for how it captured love and generosity in virtual space. And now we have Benjamin Ree’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” which is a rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.

“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at the age of 25. Mats lived out his final years nearly immobilized, the result of being born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare inherited disease that has no cure. Mats’ family knew him as smart and loving, but grieved while watching him grow more withdrawn as his symptoms progressed. He would spend most of his waking hours on his computer, playing games. “Our deepest regret was that he would never experience friends, love, or make a difference in other people’s lives,” his father, Robert, tells Ree.

Mats’ family were loving, attentive and supportive of him to the very end. But they were wrong about the friends and making a difference part. Oh, were they wrong.

Mats left behind something for his family to find: the password to his blog. Robert and Trude, Mats’ mother, logged in to leave a note for any readers about his death. What happened shocked them: They began to receive emails from people all over Europe, an outpouring of love and tribute to Mats, whom everyone called “Ibelin.” They were, as Trude puts it, dumbfounded by the response. “Who are these people?” she recalls asking in the film. “Are they crazy, or what?”

They weren’t crazy at all. They were players in World of Warcraft, members of the same guild — or “community of friends,” as one participant puts it — which called itself Starlight. Mats played as a burly, friendly man he called Ibelin. It was role-playing. But it was more.

Ree tells the story of Mats’ early life in a conventional documentary way: His parents talk about their son, and home video footage of his life from infancy to his final years gives us the picture. We see Mats initially walking as a child, then slowly losing full use of his body.

But then, the tape of Mats’ life rewinds and begins to roll again. Nobody around Mats knew what his existence in World of Warcraft was like, and probably if they had, they wouldn’t have understood it. Ree’s aim is to dig beneath reality to build out Mats’ bigger story. Ree’s previous documentary, “The Painter and the Thief,” worked in several points of view to expand a complex story, in that case of a painter who befriends the man who stole her paintings from a gallery. Here, the viewpoints are like brushstrokes that fill in a portrait of Mats as Ibelin.

But of course, World of Warcraft is not the sort of place you can just drop into with your camera. Instead, Ree took an unusual approach. The World of Warcraft guild to which Mats belonged had saved logs of everyone’s text-based interactions — 42,000 pages of logs, in fact, which included conversations and character descriptions written by Mats and his friends in the course of playing the game.

Using the gargantuan archive, animators reconstructed events that occurred inside the game, basing the characters on the look of the game itself. Actors read the dialogue. An actor who, we’re told, sounds a lot like Mats also reads from his blog, filling in Mats’ thoughts and feelings as he lives his Ibelin life. It makes for a different kind of reconstruction than we’re used to in contemporary documentary.

The emotional power of “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” comes from the way the film brings together the virtual and the physical. We don’t spend the whole time in World of Warcraft; instead, the film’s focus is the way that Mats, as Ibelin, was involved in other players’ lives. A significant friend is Lisette, who lives in the Netherlands and met Mats in the game when they were both teenagers. Another is Xenia-Anni, a Danish mother who struggled to connect with her son Mikkel, in part because of his autism, until they met Mats in the game.And in the end it’s all in service to a bigger truth, both about Mats’ life and about our own. In these still early days of whatever the internet will become, we tend to draw bright lines between one world and the other, between who we are online and who we are in real life. But the truth is that whoever we are in one space spills into the other. The discovery of Mats’ remarkable life as Ibelin had a profound effect on those who saw one man in a wheelchair, and only later knew the whole story.