Review by Andrew Swafford
Don’t you think it’s a little terrifying that our world’s leaders are just continuing to do nothing about so many ongoing global crises? The most inexcusable might be climate change, an actual apocalyptic force that we see more and more evidence of every day — like the destructive hurricanes that hit Cinematary’s neck of the woods just this year. Guy Maddin and the Brothers Johnson certainly agree: it’s horrifying to the point of getting absurd.
Prior to Rumours, the team was known primarily for making capital-A capital-G Avant-Garde cinema (The Forbidden Room), stupefying found documents (Careful), and virtuosic film projects (The Green Fog). Their new film, however, initially seems downright normal. It’s a political farce! Seven fantastic actors play seven world leaders meeting at the G7 summit — most notably Cate Blanchett as Germany, Denis Ménochet as France, and fucking Charles Dance as America (actually named Edison), never hiding his Britishness nor his Doddering Old Manness in his lampooning of not-quite-Biden, but moreso some idea of America as an obviously failing state.
The film’s first act is a dark comedy of manners, in which these leaders meet to “draft an outline of a provisional statement” about a “crisis” which none of them have the courage to name. This is a bureaucratic inconvenience for them, an annual meeting where they’re asked to rewrite the mission statement for the office. They’d rather get sloppy drunk and make out in the woods before try to actually solve a global crisis. Meanwhile — there’s a crisis or two going on, soon encroaching upon the G7 leaders themselves in the form of a Bog Bodies zombie apocalypse. At one point, Canada offers an acknowledgement and an apology to the resurrected corpses of Indigenous people before chucking a shovel into their skulls. Much of the film is hilarious, like if Luis Buñuel made Night of the Living Dead or something, and features so many absurd musical stingers that gives the movie a great sense of fun as we watch these monsters get what’s coming to them.
Unfortunately, the film does get a bit lost in the woods as its characters eventually do. Without much sense of direction, the second act wanders and its own characters seem of tire of bouncing off each other after a while. Fortunately, the movie does take a left-turn in the final stretch, revealing itself to as a cosmic horror story about the advent of AI. Perhaps symbolized by the giant brain the G7 leaders eventually stumble upon in the woods, Artificial Intelligence has suddenly descended upon us like an alien life-form (“The Night Queen”) in the midst of so many already spiraling crises. The world seems to be changing hands – in the words of cosmic horror grandaddy H.P. Lovecraft: “the world and perhaps the universe [passing] from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.” As a high-school English teacher who has seen the front lines of the AI wars, I really appreciated Rumors for its willingness to see something horrifying in the idea that these world leaders might resort to writing their provisional statement with ChatGPT.