There is a moment early on in The Forbidden Room (2015), the phantasmagoric melodrama co-directed by Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, when a submarine crew, running low on oxygen as they transport a case of combustible jelly, is startled by the arrival of a teleporting lumberjack plotting to rescue his amnesiac lover, who for some reason is being held in the “pink warm centre” of a cave. Such bizarreries are to be expected in a Maddin-Johnson joint, which usually comes complete with its own outré rituals, a fluency in absurd world-building, characters confined by eroticised milieux, and a slipperiness of time and place reminiscent of folk tales.
After co-directing The Forbidden Room, The Green Fog (2017) and five short films, Maddin and Johnson renew their collaboration (alongside Galen Johnson, brother of Evan) with Rumours, a deeply funny, irreverent film set around a G7 summit. Tasked with writing a provisional statement on an unspecified global crisis, the leaders of the G7 – an intergovernmental bloc of the seven wealthiest liberal democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – find themselves deserted and preyed upon in a nightmarish forest. This scenario mobilises the political paranoia of the elite against themselves, propelling them into a globalist quagmire of apocalyptic proportions, to the accompaniment of an exaggerated score by the Danish composer Kristian Eidnes Andersen (a frequent collaborator of Lars von Trier), which swings from low hums to full-bodied saxophone.
Rumours begins with a press conference at Dankerode Castle, as it is Germany’s turn to host the annual forum, much to the delight of Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), a persnickety, stiff-wigged Angela Merkel type. The heads of government tour the vast grounds, where they happen upon (and pose beside) the exhumed cadaver of a disgraced political leader from the Iron Age, penis hung like a pendant around his neck. The creature is a hideous and pulpy bog body; the bog’s acids are said to have dissolved the bones while preserving the skin, a fitting mascot for these national figureheads who are concerned only with surface details. The group’s dopey grins show no signs of heeding the obvious warning; French president Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) even proudly proclaims that he is penning a book on “the psychogeographies of graveyards”.
For hours, they sit in a newly erected gazebo, feigning interest in the draft they are supposed to be writing – meaning they gulp wine and flirt with each other over laptops and notepads while poking at the event’s theme of ‘regret’. Even cursory talk of remorse bothers Canadian prime minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis, also the teleporting lumberjack in The Forbidden Room), who is embroiled in a considerably dull financial scandal back home. The directors winkingly inflate Canada’s position on the world stage through Maxime’s machismo and flair for drama; Dupuis acts as a floppier Justin Trudeau character, a tortured playboy with a man-bun. (Rumours is largely a display case for Blanchett and Dupuis, who, in a riotous bit of geopolitical fan fiction, have sex on the forest floor.)
Once the world leaders realise nobody has come to clear their plates or offer a digestif, and that they have no mobile reception, a thick sense of unease begins to settle around them, underpinned by Sylvain’s belief that he was attacked by a corpse. The threat of zombified bureaucrats drives them into the surrounding woods, where they encounter a literal circle-jerk of bog bodies around a campfire, an AI sex crimes chatbot, and a hatchback-sized brain guarded by the president of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander, speaking Swedish). Meanwhile, Sylvain becomes convinced that his bones, too, are dissolving;he is pushed around in a wheelbarrow, balancing a laptop on which he transcribes the group’s nonsense.
This gulf in articulation – leaders who speak like children, one whose tongue has been seized by Sweden, a US president inexplicably played by Charles Dance in his native English accent – seems to signal back to the matter of the futile letter they are meant to be writing to the public. The crisis is cartoonishly vague, intended as a jab at the emptiness of governmental doublespeak.
Rumours is a far cry from Maddin’s early solo work, emulating early talkies in hypnagogic, greyscale melodramas and Winnipeg-set parables shot on film, such as Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Archangel (1990), Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and My Winnipeg (2007). This latest is comparatively tame, with fewer avant-garde embellishments and a linear plot, far less frenzied editing and sound design – though flush with primordial goo and cast in a frequent magenta fog. It would be screwy to call a Maddin film ‘mainstream’ – and Rumours is not that – but it does have a commercial lustre.
“There are times when I miss the methods on display in Gimli, where you just go find some props, ask an actor friend of yours to star, get the costumes from the navy surplus store, and then just order up some film and shoot,” Maddin said in a 2022 interview with the Globe & Mail. Even without the ad hocness, Rumours invests in the same absurd, metaphysical trappings of past pictures.
The directors’ facetiousness might be mistaken for insincerity but, as in all of Maddin’s films, truth, however inscrutable, is tucked into the folds of melodramatic action. Rumours uses political burlesque to foretell the end of the world: an elite few perform bureaucracy for each other, and are punished for it, while the outside world burns. Its bare-bones premise might recall Stanley Kubrick’s epochal satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), while the film is also impressively committing to Buñuelian stakes and zombie film aesthetics.
The film’s provocations ultimately reveal that no matter how much these dignitaries are tortured and mocked, their failures, both within and outside this strange peril, portend our extinction. (A disputatious bit of flag-burning at the end invokes questions of whether these banners symbolise a useless global order or the populations which inhabit them.) Rumours both laments and salutes a world where heads of state are stripped of their shiny national influence; the farthest these seven can reach is to the conference goody bags – each one containing crisps and a cyanide pill.
► Rumours arrives in UK cinemas 6 December.
