Probing the mind of Jaco Van Dormael is like stumbling into a Magritte painting while listening to a Philip Glass record played backwards: an experience that dismantles everyday certainties to reveal the dizzying poetry nestled in the absurd. With "The Brand New Testament," the Belgian director doesn't just direct a film; he orchestrates a theological fugue, an apocryphal gospel for the 21st century that has the irreverence of a Voltaire pamphlet and the bittersweet tenderness of a Jeunet film, if Jeunet had spent an afternoon discussing Gnosticism with Luis Buñuel.

Van Dormael's God is not Aristotle's unmoved mover, nor the great architect of the universe. He is a petty demiurge, a bureaucrat of chaos in a bathrobe and slippers, played by a Benoît Poelvoorde who is masterful in his abject normality. He lives in a claustrophobic Brussels flat, a non-place that serves as Creation's central server, and governs humanity via an antediluvian computer, amusing himself by inventing the Laws of Universal Bad Luck: toast always lands jam-side down, the other supermarket queue is always faster, and so on. This is not the theology of the sublime, but the theodicy of the nuisance, a universe founded not on original sin, but on perpetual irritation. The apartment itself is a masterpiece of Gilliam-esque design, a domestic hell of exposed pipes and dusty archives reminiscent of the dystopian bureaucracy in Brazil, where absolute power is all the more terrifying for being so squalid and incompetent.

The rebellion, as often happens in the most archetypal narratives, comes from within. It is not Lucifer who leads the revolt, but Ea (a seraphic and determined Pili Groyne), God's ten-year-old daughter, tired of her father's abuse and the silent resignation of her mother, a passive Goddess who collects baseball cards and communicates only through embroidery. In an act of digital sabotage and eschatological liberation, Ea enters her father's study, hacks the sacred computer, and sends every human on Earth a text message with their own, unappealable, date of death. It's a devastatingly brilliant premise. Van Dormael takes humanity's greatest existential mystery and turns it into a push notification, a raw datum that strips life of all metaphysical pretence.

What happens when the ultimate horizon becomes a fixed appointment in your calendar? The film explores this question not with the gloom of a Bergman-esque existential drama, but with the fragmented and bizarre curiosity of a catalogue of human reactions. Some leap from rooftops to test the prophecy's infallibility, some decide to become real-life video game heroes, others quit a hated job to learn how to talk to birds. Knowledge of the end doesn't necessarily lead to despair, but to a radical renegotiation of the present. Freed from the anxiety of the unknown, the characters are forced to confront an even more pressing question: not when will it end, but how do I want to live the time I have left?

Having escaped her father's flat through the porthole of a washing machine—a surreal gateway connecting the divine to the most prosaic of worlds, a Belgian laundromat—Ea embarks on a mission: to find six new apostles and write a "Brand New Testament". Unlike her brother J.C., whose apostles were fishermen and publicans, Ea's are a cross-section of modern solitudes, lost souls in grey, rainy Brussels. Each apostle becomes the protagonist of a self-contained vignette, a short film within the film that reveals their "inner music," a musical leitmotif that defines their emotional essence.

Here, Van Dormael unleashes his full talent for magical realism, a heritage that seems to descend more from Italo Calvino than from Gabriel García Márquez. The stories are bittersweet fables celebrating the unpredictable beauty of human connection. There's the lonely office worker (a Catherine Deneuve who is sublime in her vulnerability) who finds love with a gorilla; the contract killer who discovers a new calling; the sex addict who falls for a one-armed woman, finally finding an intimacy that transcends the flesh; a sick boy who decides to live his last days as a girl to understand what the other half of the sky is like. These are tales that, taken individually, might border on the twee, on weirdness for weirdness' sake. But in the film's overall architecture, they become verses in a new secular and humanist gospel, a sacred text written not by divine authority, but collected from the voices of the downtrodden.

The film is a ferocious, yet never cynical, critique of patriarchal religion. The God-Father is a figure of pure ego, a creator who has shaped the world in his own image: chaotic, cruel, and patriarchal. Salvation, Van Dormael suggests, is a feminine act. Ea doesn't perform grandiose miracles; she doesn't walk on water or multiply loaves. Her power is listening, empathy. She is a messiah who doesn't preach, but collects stories. And the culmination of this matriarchal revolution arrives in the finale, when the Goddess-Mother, finally freed from her subjugation, takes control of the computer and reprograms the world. The sky is no longer a grey ceiling but a perpetually shifting floral fantasy, a work of art both kitsch and wonderful. The laws of physics are rewritten according to a principle not of annoyance, but of kindness and irony. It is the triumph of imagination over tyranny, of aesthetics over brutal logic.

Stylistically, "The Brand New Testament" is a work of overflowing visual inventiveness, blending stop-motion animation, discreet special effects, and cinematography that enhances the melancholic beauty of the Belgian capital. The narration, delivered in Ea's voice-over, has the tone of a fairy tale for adults, a candour that creates a fascinating counterpoint to the blasphemy of the premise. Van Dormael quotes himself and his previous films, particularly Toto the Hero and Mr. Nobody, revisiting the themes of memory, destiny, and the infinite possibilities that branch from every choice. But while Mr. Nobody was a complex, almost labyrinthine philosophical exploration of the multiverse, this film has a simpler, more direct heart: the search for a small, personal scrap of happiness in a poorly designed universe.

Ultimately, "The Brand New Testament" is a profoundly subversive work that manages to be a theological satire, a black comedy, and a moving ode to human fragility all at once. It belongs to that strain of European cinema unafraid to think big, to tackle the ultimate questions with the tools of fantasy and irony. It is a film that reminds us that, even if the universe were governed by an idiot in a bathrobe, the ability to tell and listen to each other's stories remains the most revolutionary and redemptive act of faith we are granted. And that perhaps the true miracle isn't parting the seas, but finding someone who understands the music inside you.