Gunnar Hall Jensen's convenient middle class existence is about to come apart at the seams. Something is tingling him like a thorn in the side. What is it that Gunnar is lacking? The troubling suburban ennui sets off the hunt for answers to age-old questions, and Gunnar assembles his team to travel to Egypt, where the monks in the world's oldest monastery can maybe help out by giving him an answer. However, the sausage-coloured, Scandinavian grill idyl soon clashes with the ascetic life of a monk, which meets the small team on their adventure, and the result is an inviting and attentive fable about modern disoriented man. Great amounts of ironic pop counterbalance a heavy topic, and "Gunnar Goes God" lightly leaps between a seeking personal existentialism and modern performance comedy. Can a film tell us what happiness is? Or faith? Gunnar uses the documentary process as his own personal therapy, and the audience takes on a role as a silent conversational partner for the questions and answers that he picks up en route. The ever topical search for a meaning is something we can all recognise, and the honest, inviting portrait and mirror image treats the topic with an entertaining humility that is neither moralising nor banal.

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