User reviews

The friend I watched this with and I concur: this is the weirdest movie we've ever seen. And we each say that with approval.

Rumours is an absurdist movie that seems engineered to tantalize the viewer with the hope of solving its mysteries - Why are the bog bodies rising? What 'crisis' are the G7 leaders there to address?

Why, as another character asks, does the American president have that thick English accent? - while intentionally denying us the resolution of those questions. For some, this will be infuriating, and this movie is not for those people. The calculated onslaught of keeping us off-balance as viewers inflicts comedy through the awkward hilarity of how ridiculous this whole setup is. Rumours is a truly unique and original cinematic ride, and if you're in the right mindset for that, come and experience it. Just know that you're signing up for an extremely nontraditional film. (That's the point.)

"Rumours" is a Guy Maddin film. So you need to know going in that it will be an absurd, surrealistic, over-the-top festival of craziness.

Maddin's first film came out in 1985. Since then, he has completed twelve feature films and dozens of shorts that are iconic among cinephiles. His work includes a short film starring Isabella Rossellini as a legless matriarch who sponsors a competition to discover which country produces the saddest music in the world. For another film, Maddin stipulated that during its theatrical release an eleven-piece orchestra, a Canadian castrato vocalist and a narrator doing voiceovers must all participate live at each screening. In a related development, the film was never offered in wide release.

In "Rumours," Maddin co-directs with long-time colleagues Evan and Galen Johnson. Evan Johnson wrote the script. The story centers on a meeting of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan UK, US) to address an unspecified international emergency. The group soon begins to draft a position statement, in lieu of taking actual action. Even this tepid response is sabotaged by the personal agendas of the participants. The Canadian Prime Minister sleeps with the Chancellor of Germany, in part to compensate for the emotional indifference of the UK Prime Minister, a previous paramour. The French President feels the need to emote at every opportunity. The Italian President unctuously offers other G7 members a variety of sausages from the inner pockets of his coat. Eventually, these "leaders" find themselves mysteriously abandoned by the support staff. They stumble around on fog-shrouded terrain, encounter an all-seeing AI tasked with rooting out pedophiles and discover an unbodied brain the size of an SUV.

Several major actors have lent their star power to this endeavor. Of course Australian Cate Blanchett is the Chancellor of Germany. Charles Dance, a quintessential Brit (Tywin Lannister in "Game of Thrones," Lord Mountbatten in "The Crown"), portrays the US President without the inconvenience of eliminating his upper-class British accent. In a refreshing change of pace, the other G7 representatives are all veteran actors native to the countries they represent. Alicia Vikander has an incendiary cameo as an EU functionary/apocalyptic prophet whose predictions of doom are somewhat less effective because they are uttered in Swedish.

Professional critics apparently are contractually obligated to swoon because this is (kneel and genuflect here) Guy Maddin. Regular moviegoers are more likely to just pass out from boredom. While this film makes a fair point about the fecklessness of many of the leaders on the world stage, it's ultimately a one-note tune that becomes tiresome. "Rumours" elongates material would make an inspired, captivating short film. But here, it stretches its content and the moviegoers' patience past the breaking point.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Madden has made some strange experimental movies that I have enjoyed. Working with his collaborators Galen and Evan Johnson, Madden provides a strange and satirical political that offers some really strange narrative and character choices, that is pretty funny and interesting.

While some of the humor and the themes feel a bit tedious as it seems Madden and his buddies are a bit messy with handling it's balance, undeniably, Madden always offers something that is really different and unique with the narrative, themes, and style. The camerawork and presentation is great and all of the performances are pretty good.

The dialogue is intentionally written strangely and due to it's non-serious tone, the characters are pretty engaging and found myself laughing on the themes of political circle-jerk and the insanity it offers.

Of course it's not Madden's best work but it's a good surrealist type movie.

I'm a sucker for satires so Rumours is mostly an A game for me but it felt like the directors (three of them here) lost what to do with all that build-up as the plot loses its way. There are bulbous shoots of top-tier political satire here, accentuated by the incredible cast, but I can't say for sure that I got what they were trying to prove at the end. Is it that all politics is meaningless and only about selfishness? What was Alicia Vikander doing here in one of her worst performances? Maybe it's the gibberish that she was spewing that got me off but Rumours ended in a bad note than how it started. The first 40 minutes of Rumours is a 10/10.

(Watched at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)

The leaders of the seven greatest and wealthiest democracies gather for a G7 summit to draft a statement on a global crisis. As they work through the process, something peculiar occurs: Everyone suddenly disappears. Left stranded in the middle of the woods, the group works its way back to civilization, encountering oddities along the way.

This is a satirical dark comedy about global politics and group projects. The movie openly mocks world leaders and the concept of using forms to solve world problems. The G7 summit is portrayed as a group project, and anyone who has done one knows each participant has a role. All this and some outlandish mythology lead the viewer down a one-hour and forty-three-minute journey. This might be worth a stream for people who enjoy political and dark comedy. For others, it might be unentertaining.

Truly good satire needs a razor-sharp edge to succeed, but this latest effort from director Guy Maddin (in collaboration with filmmaking partners Evan and Galen Johnson) falls stunningly flat, resulting in a rambling, unfocused slog that somehow manages to mix messages and symbology that are simultaneously both cryptically understated and patently obvious. Set at a G7 summit in Germany, world leaders from the host country and their American, Canadian, British, French, Italian and Japanese counterparts (along with delegates from the European Union) hold their annual gathering to discuss the state of the world and pat themselves on the back for a self-congratulatory job well done (despite not possessing the requisite skills to accomplish anything meaningful or of substantive consequence other than keeping their nations' respective seats warm). They smile their hollow smiles and make empty though allegedly profound observations about a variety of subjects, all while attempting to craft one of their famous joint statements (position papers that the American president openly admits no one ever reads). In this case, the communique is meant to address some kind of undefined global crisis, but it appears to be one with apocalyptic overtones. But, in the course of their "work" - an undertaking for which they're far from qualified - they quickly find themselves in over their heads when the infrastructure around them begins to crumble, a circumstance made more ominous by the appearance of inexplicable apparitions and zombie-like bog creatures straight out of classic folklore and middle European fairy tales. One might think that this would make for an interesting premise in telling a surrealistically satirical fable about the state of contemporary world politics, but the execution here is so poorly carried off that it ends up amounting to little more than oh so much intellectual and symbolic masturbation (depicted here a little too literally and repetitive at that). To complicate matters, the narrative incorporates countless developments that go wholly unexplained, some of which presumably have to do with the symbolic emasculation of a prevailing patriarchal world in favor of an emerging female-directed paradigm, but others of which are just so enigmatically absurd that they defy description, explanation or purpose (there's more of that masturbation again, only this time reflected in the nature of the picture's screenplay elements). The overall result is a mess of a movie that, despite its gifted ensemble cast and atmospheric cinematography and production design, just doesn't work, especially since the insights it's trying to impart aren't particularly new, revelatory or funny. We're well aware of how inept many of the world's supposedly astute leaders are these days, including the fact that they're cluelessly engaged in little more than what amounts to unconscious acts of that aforementioned "self-love" (and self-aggrandizing ones at that), but do we really need a movie to remind us of that (especially one as shabbily made as this)? No thanks. If I were you, I'd duck out of this one and see what else is playing at the multiplex (or, better yet, skip it altogether).

The broad set-up is a G7 summit in a German country estate, where various leaders, played by Cate Blanchett, and Charles Dance (with a deliberate English accent) amongst others, soon face a personal crisis involving mysterious figures in the woods on top of the unspecified global crisis that the summit is supposed to address.

Anyone looking for a direct satire of current world leaders or a specific ecological or AI theme will probably be disappointed, but if you're in the mood for some unusual film making with plenty to laugh at, and some visual shocks then you might enjoy it. I watched the film as part the London Film Festival, during which the audience laughed out loud frequently and seemed to enjoy the absurdist humour and surreal plot twists.

For fans of the directors' (all three of them) previous work, this is probably *less* surreal and more naturalistic in its look and feel - but no less enjoyable for that.

I really didn't like this film. Fundamentally, almost nothing here worked for me. The satire can be summed up as 'politicians dumb', the photography is super weird and cheap looking, and the surrealist scenes are done without artistic reason. I have so much to say, and somehow this film has left me speechless.

Perhaps we can talk about some of the good? Cate Blanchett is okay in the lead role, but the material is so weak that it's hard to make heads or tails out of her actual performance. There are actually a couple good jokes sprinkled about its runtime. The jokes about trapping pedophiles and protestors attacking the leaders were pretty good, but only ephemeral glimmers of escape in the time warp that was this film. Perhaps another positive is that the characters in the group are all very distinctive, albeit mostly one dimensional.

On the whole, you can tell that this film is drawing from that Monty-Python-esque tradition of dry British satire, but there is so little endearing about the film. The characters are not particularly likeable, and the film makes no effort to make us want to root for the protagonists. The plot should be a straightforward zombie survival plot, but somehow we meander around with few goals or progress through the entire runtime. I'm sorry to say that the photography is awful. In day scenes, there is an ever present, odd cheesy glow. For the rest of the film, all shots are tight, despite being outdoors for virtually the whole film. It seems like just out of frame are the warehouse lights and HVAC system for the cheap and repetitive looking set. Nikki Amuka-Bird had a very poor showing in performance. Truly YouTube level acting.

Shockingly cheap film for a movie with real Hollywood actors in it.

I thought it was a hoot. Very goofy story & characters, and I thought everybody was very good in it. It was a lot of fun to hear Charles Dance get to say some hilarious lines after a long career playing villains and buttoned-down characters. Listen for what I thought was the film's best line ... having to do with the size of women's brains. This was followed closely by a discussion about politicians & pedophiles by Cate Blanchett. As usual, Cate was terrific. I didn't quite understand the purpose of Alicia Vikander's character, but she was good. However, perhaps the best characters were the bog people.

There will probably be people who claim they liked this and if you didn't, then you're not savvy enough to get it. If it's meant to be satire, it failed. There's a lot of things that occur that go unexplained. Random characters are introduced that add nothing to the story, just more confusion as to wtf is going on. I read reviews that said this movie was funny...I didn't even smile once. I support original ideas as I'm tired of sequels and prequels, but carnage like this is why people keep going back to what they know. I've only walked out on one movie before, this would've been number two if I didn't just need to waste time.

I was very excited for this. Trailer looked promising and the offbeat quirky vibe is right up my alley. Think new wave grindhouse with all sorts of weird elements. That is what I was led to believe I might witness.

What I paid for was no more than an AI horror camp comedy script that might have had the redo button clicked a few times while using Microsoft Copilot. Only thing that made me laugh out loud (I was the only attendee for the 4:40pm est screening) was the amount of dirty penises that abundant throughout this stinker.

Avoid if you value breathing oxygen to keep your cells nourished to sustain life.

Ridiculous. Pointless. Miscast.

Right off the bat... the American president has an English accent. The Canadian president is a player with silver hair who's very very sensitive. An embarrassment. I guess it was supposed to be a comedy? A horror movie? It did neither effectively. Fortunately, there was no one left in the theater by the time I screamed W. T f at the ending. A big brain would have come in handy for the people who green lit this. Stunning to see that there was cooperation from the G7 in making this.

The story is about the G7 leaders somehow meeting in a gazebo in the midlife of nowhere during an unexplained crisis. An archeological big brings out some, I guess mud zombies?

What a disappointment. A totally pointless plot with no metaphorical meaning makes fun of characters without a goal and without a challenge.

The boring satire of a satire. Flat characters. No depth of storytelling. Pointless chatter without any drive.

Not a beat of subversiveness.

After that film one feels like you ate a big loaf of white bread and now you have to digest this big chunk of nothing.

I wonder if the giant brain they find in the forest is the brain of Cate Blanchett, who joined the cast of this painfully boring film, which is a sheer waste of time, which has nothing to say and where you can't learn or take anything away from.

I want my time and money back!

This was the worst movie I have ever sat through and if I ever meet the writer, director, producer or Cate Blanchette, I will not only spit on their shoes, I will full-on punch them in the FACE. I cannot believe ANYBODY spent money to produce this and the company that green-lighted this should fire everyone who participated. I had high hopes for a fun movie, but was so very disappointed. No satire, nothing funny, only like two jokes total. Very embarrassing how they portrayed the worlds' leaders, but NOT funny! Saturday Night Live does a better job. I was just astounded throughout the whole movie that nothing was funny, there was no real horror and most of all, there were no politics! Very sad.

Rumour has it there's a new movie out written and directed by 3 different people: Galen Johnson, Evan Johnson, and Guy Madden. A Canadian/German production, RUMOURS is a satirical look at the annual G7 summit, gathering together 7 of the world leaders who try to prepare a joint statement to address an unspecified world crisis. I really enjoy weird movies, but this one almost pushed my tolerance to the limit. It took a bit to understand the kind of humour this movie is going for. I appreciate it a tiny bit more now that I've had time to contemplate. Basically, it's a movie that says politicians and world leaders are more focused on drawing up a statement than actually taking any action. There is still one aspect of the movie I still don't understand, which I can't tell you about, just know it's very weird. According to this movie, politics is just one big circle-jerk. A few standout performances from Cate Blanchett, Roy Dupius, and Denis Ménochet carry the film. So much of RUMOURS is strange and surreal, but I feel like it's full of symbolism and metaphors. I understood some of them. By the end, I think I had a fun time?

This was a very strange movie. I was expecting to see more comedy rather than just a couple of jokes here and there especially because of its description saying "it's a laugh out loud comedy". At first I didn't know whether I liked it or hated it, but I have come to the conclusion that it's unratable in my eyes. All the twists remained unanswered, there's too many different themes going on all at once, and the ending was TERRIBLE. There are so many things wrong about the movie and so many things they could've done better with the movie, specifically the story telling aspect of it. Considering the ticket for the movie was only $6, I'm not mad that I spent the money to see it, but I am still upset about the way I left the theater. All i could think of is "why?" "Why that ending?". And if you're looking to see this movie and you think you know what's gonna happen, trust me, you don't. I wouldn't really suggest going out of your way to see this movie, but if you did want to see it, I suggest just bundling up at home and watching that way.