The opening credits of Rumours formally thank the leaders of the G7. Which must be some kind of joke, because none of them emerges reputationally intact from this very weird film. Though getting a precise bead on the type of humour in play is tricky. Is it political satire? Cultural satire? Surreal japery? Guy Maddin is involved – co-writing and directing with brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – so who honestly knows.
Maddin’s films don’t make money but he has fans in the right places, often managing to snag the sort of actor audiences might not expect, playing the sort of role the actor probably didn’t expect. Isabella Rossellini as a beer heiress in The Saddest Music in the World. Jason Patric as a modern Ulysses on an odyssey through his own house in Keyhole. Mathieu Amalric as a man obsessed with stuffed animals in The Forbidden Room. Arch arthouse is Maddin’s stock in trade.
This time the name is Cate Blanchett, who leads a pretty starry cast, as German chancellor Hilda Ortmann welcoming fellow leaders of the G7 to a summit. It’s a summit where nothing gets achieved and the whole thing ends up hijacked by strange bog beings, who have been exhumed from pits discovered on the site where the summit is taking place. At the same time all the political aides, hospitality staff and security details suddenly seem to have disappeared, leaving the world leaders on their ownsome. Undaunted, at first anyway, they plug on with the wording of their final statement, which seems to be of more concern than any actual discussion of actual world events. The fact that the bog people, only ever half glimpsed, seem to spend most of their time masturbating while Ortmann and the rest slave over the platitudinous final statement is political satire, isn’t it?
Day becomes night, the air becomes foggy and politics yield to survival. The tone shifts more decisively towards horror. The President of the EU Commission – played by Alicia Vikander – turns up at one point, to wrestle with a giant brain. At another the President of the European Council – played by Zlatko Burić – appears, only to shoot himself soon afterwards.
In among the surreal detours there are several running jokes, the best being the one about libidinous Canadian prime minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) having apparently slept with every female leader in the world – a dig at Justin Trudeau perhaps?
The tone is fraught Brazilian telenovela meets Knives Out with quite a lot of question marks attached to any attempt to nail the precise genre to the wall. Blanchett keeps it crisp and precise as Hilda, a mix of Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen. And alongside her and Dupuis, plus the brief appearances by Vikander and Burić, there’s Charles Dance as the philosophical American President (Dance’s entirely British accent is never explained), Nikki Amuka-Bird as the British PM, Denis Ménochet as President of France, Roland Revello as the Prime Minister of Italy and Takehiro Hira as the PM of Japan.
Maddin movies often take place indoors. It must be the influence of the Johnsons that’s prompted the move outside, though the Maddin sense of extreme claustrophobia prevails. Veering from the absurd to the surreal to the comic to the gothic, Rumours appears to be working on the principle that a moving target is harder to hit. One minute it’s Vikander speaking only in “gibberish” (it is in fact Swedish, her native tongue). The next it’s the French PM falling into a pit and coming into contact with a bog person. The next it’s the political leaders quoting the greatest hits of concluding G7 statements of years gone by to each other as they traipse through the woods trying to find help.
Where this is all heading is really anyone’s guess. Trenchant political satire it is not. By the end, after death and horror have been meted out in ways that are funny and puzzling, the remaining leaders continue to put the finishing touches to their draft statement, wanging on about diversity and respect for minorities while below them the bog people are wanking themselves silly. Satire, huh.
Rumours – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
