Rumours’ Goofy Political Satire Has a Giant Glowing Brain

The director Guy Maddin’s latest, which just premiered at Cannes, has a glorious B-movie sheen. Photo: Bleecker Street

This review was originally published on May 18, 2024 out of the Cannes Film Festival. We are recirculating it now that Rumours is in theaters.

With Rumours, the legendary Canadian director Guy Maddin, working with his regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, has made what might be his funniest film to date. But, as always with Maddin, the humor is somewhat rarefied. Rumours follows the leaders of the G7 as they get lost in a German forest and are beset by mysterious ancient figures, while also being consumed by their own strange passions. Cate Blanchett plays the stylish, domineering German chancellor, intent on keeping the group together but also unafraid of a quickie in the woods with the hunky, man-bunned Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis), who himself is an indecisive milquetoast still carrying torches for his lost loves. The lordly Charles Dance plays the U.S. president and doesn’t bother hiding his British accent. Alicia Vikander plays the president of the European Union as a feral witch muttering nonsense prophecies in Swedish. At one point a giant glowing brain the size of a hatchback appears in the woods. I swear to god I am not lying when I tell you that this is also the most accessible movie Maddin has made.

The humor in Rumours does require some vague familiarity with the way these public international get-togethers — be it the G7 summit, the NATO summit, or assorted UN gatherings — never result in anything resembling real actions or solutions, instead issuing countless weak-willed joint statements and working papers and other forms of diplo-blather. (The fact that the film assumes its audience will get this also suggests that Rumours might be one of the most Canadian films Maddin has ever made, which certainly is saying something.) Early on, the German leader invites her colleagues to view a recent archeological find: a perfectly mummified, millennia-old corpse, a “bog man” whose penis has been severed and wrapped around his neck. The speculation is that this was a former leader, “sacrificially murdered for failing to deliver on the promise of a good harvest.” We’ll see more bog men later — hanging from trees, lumbering in the woods, collectively masturbating in animalistic unison. Somehow, these gooey mummies covered in mud and shit and jacking off in the depths of a German forest serve as both a metaphor for and a counterpoint to these modern-day leaders’ ineffectiveness.

Maddin gained renown at the start of his career for his layered and witty pastiches of silent film. He’s a mix-master of old-school melodrama and German expressionism, and Rumours similarly indulges in playful nods to the cinematic past. There’s a sick, pink, B-movie drive-in glow to much of the picture. When the Canadian and U.K. prime ministers (the latter played by Nikki Amuka-Bird) briefly discuss an old love affair, the music swells with saxy, bluesy longing. When Canada later relates, with histrionic anguish, the profoundly tiresome details of the “carried interest scandal” that has doomed his political future, a horror movie organ starts up on the soundtrack. A moment of mundane physical bravery is accompanied by triumphant bursts of Enya’s “Exile,” like something out of Last of the Mohicans. There are also just funny random bits, like the Italian leader’s constant passing around of salami he stole from the luncheon buffet, or lines such as: “Germany caught up in dramatics. We’ve seen this before.”

The danger of movies based on conceptual wit is that they will lose steam as things proceed and the filmmakers run out of ideas. Thankfully, Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming. Rumours starts off focusing on how the cocoon of leadership is both a privilege and a curse for these people. By the end, we understand that the ones who are truly doomed are the rest of us. But just because we’re choking on our laughter doesn’t mean we’re not still laughing.