Rumours is a 2024 comedy horror film from Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, who wrote and directed it together. The tagline sells it as “The Official Motion Picture of the G7.” That is the joke, and it is also the thesis. Seven leaders of the world’s wealthiest liberal democracies get lost in the woods, and the film stays funny about it.
The Provisional Statement
The setup is bureaucratic. The execution is not. The leaders gather at a German hotel to draft a statement about a crisis the film never specifies, and they treat the work as a nuisance. The Canadian Prime Minister wants to revive a past affair with the British Prime Minister, gets turned down, and takes up with the German Chancellor in the woods instead. Procedure collapses into appetite, and that is the first act.
The film premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2024. Reviews were generally positive.
Who Carries What
The cast is unusually large for a comedy, and the film gives all of them room:
- Cate Blanchett as Hilda Orlmann
- Charles Dance as Edison Wolcott
- Roy Dupuis as Maxime Laplace
- Nikki Amuka-Bird as Cardosa Dewindt
- Denis Ménochet as Sylvain Broulez
- Takehiro Hira as Tatsuro Iwasaki
- Rolando Ravello as Antonio Lamorle
- Zlatko Burić as Jonas Glob
- Alicia Vikander as Celestine Sproul
Nine names, one room, nobody willing to be the adult.
After Sunset
| Element | Rumours | The standard crisis film |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | A German hotel, then the woods | One room, one clock |
| Turning point | Reanimated bog bodies | A confession |
| Antagonist | Fog, and a giant brain | Another person |
| Ending | Flames, and a few bog bodies listening | Resolution |
The French Prime Minister comes back to the gazebo with news: bog bodies dug up that day have reanimated. The servers have vanished. So has everyone else. The group wanders into thick fog and finds a giant brain, which only the President of the European Commission — abruptly speaking Swedish, and understood by no one — thinks matters. She sets herself and the brain alight.
That is the film’s best sequence, and it earns its length.
The Emergency Line
A call to the emergency line reaches an artificial intelligence built to catch child predators, and they play along in the hope of finding the hotel. There they meet the man running it, who kills himself before he can tell them anything useful. Then the balcony, a grandiose and meaningless statement read aloud to a handful of bog bodies, and the world burning.
The film runs 104 minutes and never resolves. That is not a flaw. Horror and comedy are the same instrument here, and the ending refuses the catharsis a lesser film would hand over. The statement stays provisional. The fog does not lift. What makes it worth returning to is that the refusal is the point.
Its Album of the Year user score is 8.7 out of 10.
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