The Brand New Testament

Well, that terrible song by Joan Osborne song is good for something. God is a slob like one of us in Jaco Van Dormael’s (Toto The Hero) Charlie Kaufman-meets-Jean-Pierre Jeunet absurdist comedy-drama.

"God exists. He lives in Brussels." God is a cranky, chain-smoking middle-aged man (Poelvoorde, Man Bites Dog) who shuffles about his cramped apartment in his slippers and dirty dressing gown. He delights in casting misery on the world by typing 'laws' into his Apple computer (toast always lands butter side down, the other queue moves faster). Fed up with his nasty ways, his young daughter Ea (a fantastic Groyne. Two Days One Night) logs on and sends everyone in the world the dates of their deaths, effectively robbing God of his powers (if everyone knows when they’re going to die, caution is thrown to the wind and they do what they want). With help from older brother JC (!), Ea then escapes the apartment and into downtown Brussels to seek six disciples to pen a new testament and right all of God’s wrongs. But God is in hot pursuit…

Amelie's stamp is all over this. From the kooky visuals (the severed hand dancing on a table like Fred Astaire) to the descriptive voiceover ("she looked at me like a box of thumbtacks left out") that likes to explain in detail, and through flashback, the roots of a character's kooky behaviour. But the playfulness is always and forever tempered by an undercurrent of ennui. The other apostles include the terminally sad Aurelie (Laura Verlinden), who lost her arm as a child in a subway accident, a killer Francois Damiens) who fantasises about randomly shooting people, and lonely Marc (Serge Lariviere) who is obsessed with a particular type of woman since he saw a bikini-clad teenage girl on the beach when he was eight.

Despite the tone veering from riotously funny episodes (one guy, knowing his death won't come for years yet, takes to social media to document his death-defying stunts) to desperately sad moments when the story pries into the private lives of the would-be apostles; there are some outlandish ideas too with would-be apostle Catherine Deneuve falling in love with a gorilla. Testament to the writer-director's skill that a balance between these disparate tones is somehow achieved.

Van Dormael needlessly ties up loose ends with convenient and cute coincidences but his film is bursting with original ideas.