Rumours (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, 2024)

Abandoning his usual early-cinema stylistic tendencies for what looks like a soapy TV pastiche rendered in late-Fassbinder color palettes, Guy Maddin and the Johnson brothers’ latest collaboration, Rumours, is one extended joke. Set during a G7 summit where the world leaders are tasked with writing a provisional statement about the dire state of the world, the buffoonish politicians find themselves in a zombie apocalypse.

For a while, the masturbating “bog people” are merely a fantastical backdrop for a heightened workplace comedy. Some amalgam of meaningless buzzwords (one of their pages of notes simply reads “supply-chain”) and irrelevant personal anecdotes, the G7 statement is a meaningless gesture of unity that, as Charles Dance’s American president casually notes, necessitates no concrete action. When night falls, the apocalypse emerges, and the group ventures into an enchanted forest to look for help, the characters become mostly defined by their petty interpersonal drama, centering around a web of sexual relations involving Roy Dupuis’ handsome Justin Trudeau stand-in.

I think many critics aren’t giving Rumours enough credit. As a comedy about world leaders, indifferent to the dire state of current affairs, orating their empty platitudes to a masturbatory, brain-dead audience of their own imagination, it takes easy targets and satirizes them without any of the self-righteousness that plagues any number of recent cinematic disasters (The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, American Fiction). In fact, it’s occasionally quite funny in its cartoonish audiovisual gags. The giant brain is receiving a lot of attention, but I chuckled most at Maddin and co puncturing they’re insular dreamscape with the image of Cate Blanchett’s German Chancellor handing out G7 tote bags and the sound of the world leaders crunching on potato chips. More than anything, with its smoky, set-bound forest and brilliant pinks and oranges, Rumours is just a beautiful film to look at. The stylistic flourishes aren’t just empty aesthetics either, as by the end of the film, it’s clear that Rumours looks the way it does because of the climate crisis (the film brought to mind Tilda Swinton talking about pink snow in The Room Next Door). Even that connection makes Rumours sound more serious than it is. It’s a silly sketch about political theater, and while it’s no Veep, I’m still glad to have seen it.

Rumours is distributed by Bleecker Street and in theaters now.