Rumours

The celebrated Canadian director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and installation artist Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, My Winnipeg, The Green Fog) and his frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson team up for this political satire horror comedy in which the seven leaders of the world's most powerful liberal democracies sit down to draft a provisional statement regarding a global crisis (not to solve the crisis, just to craft a statement about it) only to be abandoned, get lost in the woods, engage in high-school like behaviors, face off against masturbating undead bog-people, and face a potential global appocolyps.

The wonderful cast includes Cate Blanchett as the prime and proper Chancellor of Germany, Roy Dupuis as the Prime Minister of Canada on the verge of an emotional breakdown, Charles Dance as the inexplicably British President of the United States, Denis Ménochet as the emotional President of France, Nikki Amuka-Bird as the appeasing Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Takehiro Hira as handsome but blank Prime Minister of Japan, Rolando Ravello as the hapless but meat-carrying Prime Minister of Italy, and Alicia Vikander as the Secretary-General of the European Commission.

Absurdist films like this either start strong and fizzle out as they beat their one-joke premise to death or start amusingly and grow more and more hilariously entertaining as their crazy steaks increase. Rumours certainly fall into the latter category. If only it wasn't doomed to be instantly forgotten, or just never seen, due to its absurdly generic and unforgivable one-word title.