The Brand New Testament

Jaco Van Dormael’s film is a Belgian, French and Luxembourgish co-production, shown in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2015. God lives in a Brussels flat and runs the world from his office computer. His daughter Ea, 10, gets in, texts every human being the date of their death and escapes through the washing machine. From there the film breaks into 6 chapters, each rebuilding one life: among them a woman who lost an arm, a man who follows birds to the pole, a killer whose bullet hits a prosthetic arm, and the Martine of Catherine Deneuve, who leaves her husband for a gorilla. The ending runs on the same arithmetic. The apostles reach 18, the favourite number of God’s wife, and she is the one left at the computer. It led the 6th Magritte Awards with 10 nominations and won 4: film, director, screenplay and original score. Sylvie Olivé took production design at the 28th European Film Awards. As Belgium’s Oscar entry it made the shortlist of 9 out of 80 films and got no further. A good fit if you want a premise carried all the way to its arithmetic, down to who is left at the computer. Not for anyone who needs death dates and a gorilla played as feeling rather than as jokes.