In Jaco Van Dormael’s playfully blasphemous Belgian fantasy, God exists, lives in Brussels, and is a total bastard to his wife and daughter. Locked in a Gilliam-esque room of filing cabinets, his unholiness (played by Benoît Poelvoorde, who once turned heads and stomachs in Man Bites Dog) spends his days sadistically abusing the world’s population. Then, resourceful, resentful daughter Ea (Pili Groyne) commandeers his computer, texts the time and date of their deaths to every living soul, and escapes through a washing machine into the wonderland of the world. Here, she must assemble six random apostles while steering clear of her wrathful dad, who is getting a taste of his own earthly medicine. It’s divertingly unruly stuff, which comes on like a cross between Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death and the Irvine Welsh-penned The Granton Star Cause, while musing upon the guilt-free consequences of predestination. A scene of a priest beating up God after being told to “hate your neighbour as you hate yourself” strikes a defining note. Visually, there are echoes of Jeunet and Caro’s early collaborations, but the screenplay by Van Dormael and Thomas Gunzig is uniquely, irreverently unhinged.
