Critics reviews

The strangest thing about Guy Maddin’s Rumours, co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, might just be how relatively ordinary it feels... Maybe that’s because, despite still featuring a host of odd sights like a giant glowing brain in the woods, the film’s timely subject matter and heightened and portentous atmosphere reflects reality in an all too down-to-earth manner.

Writer/director Guy Maddin is a wonderful sicko. He’s never been hesitant to blend taboo subjects with comedy. But his latest film, “Rumours,” might be his broadest film to date. Effortlessly hilarious and deceptively thought-provoking, Maddin’s apocalyptic satire often recalls Armando Iannucci’s equally brilliant “The Death of Stalin.”

“Rumours” thrives in its broadness, especially as the lack of political specificity that it offers to its characters only deepens the fact that there isn’t a single real credo shared between them.

This is a very strange film, like a mixture of George A Romero with a crimeless, detectiveless Agatha Christie, and maybe TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Blanchett shows herself to be actually pretty good at playing comedy, leading the company in some very amusing set pieces.

Maddin and the brothers Johnson know that when you have a great script, idea, and cast you only need to give them the room to let rip. Yet, Rumours is not up there with the absolute best political satire. It is no The Death of Stalin, for a simple reason. There is a lack of a true payoff to its mockery that nails its target rather than just imagining a very funny scenario where world leaders behave like terrified children.

This triumphantly stupid ensemble comedy... casts the G7 leadership adrift in a B-movie, essentially turning the heads of the leading liberal first-world democracies into the Mystery Machine gang from Scooby-Doo.

The ineffectiveness of rhetorical politics and symbolic diplomacy... is kookily but ruthlessly skewered in “Rumours,” a wildly entertaining shaggy-dog satire that sees a stuffy G7 summit devolve into a murky, muddy and strangely isolated zombie apocalypse.

Rumours may arguably be Maddin’s most conventional film ever, or at least since The Saddest Music in the World (2003). That is, if you can call a film conventional that’s got furiously masturbating bog zombies, a giant brain the size of a hatchback, and an AI chatbot that catfishes pedophiles. All the same, it’s a hoot, even if the energy flags in the middle.

Coming across as a wry upmarket variation on pulp horror, not unlike Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, Rumours doesn’t quite maximise the potential of its incongruous encounter between the living dead and the great and good, or between urbane boardroom satire and psychotropic freakiness. What sustains it, though, are the performances, performed with relish by an ensemble cheerfully riffing on national stereotypes.

A few brief sequences towards the manic climax make for an interesting reflection on current issues such as AI... but nothing ever reaches the sharpness of the film’s first scenes. Still, out of the many things one can call the strange little creature that is “Rumours,” dull is certainly not one of them.

The film is fun for a while, and it’s certainly the most commercial project that the experimental Canadian director Guy Maddin (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) has delivered. But it’s pretty tedious, and not half as smart as it might’ve been. Plus it’s very lazy, and smug.

Anyone with a fascination for political process and the idiocies of bureaucracy will find one joke after another hitting the bullseye. For anyone else, it is mild fun at best: this is a film that, despite its general amiability, seems to divide audiences.