Rumours, the new horror satire from directors Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin, seems to have all the elements of a prestige picture. Filled with recognizable faces from two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett to former Game of Thrones star, Charles Dance, its got the glossy production and splashy rollout of the kind of indie that seems primed to become a surprise hit.
It follows a group of politicians who gather in Dankerode, Germany to draft a joint “statement” on an unspecified “crisis”. However, while sequestered in a picturesque gazebo as they struggle to draft the statement, the world leaders slowly realize that they’ve been abandoned in the face of some unspecified apocalyptic event. Within the dynamics of Evan Johnson’s script, the characters’ personalities (which satirize their home countries to varying degrees) are integral to the way the film unfolds. There’s Dance’s American President, Edison Wolcott, a jaded and dismissive elder statesman who would rather nap than earnestly try to draft a meaningless statement. There’s Denis Ménochet as France’s Sylvain Broulez, a blustery know-it-all who is prone to existential crises. Crucially, there’s Blanchett as Germany’s Hilda Orlmann, who quietly yearns for Canada’s Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis) even though he still seems fixated on a one-time dalliance with the UK’s Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird).
That last dynamic is key, as Rumours is less concerned with politics than the personal. Indeed, Johnson’s script makes comedic hay from the way the politicians strenuously avoid saying anything of substance. When Cardosa and Hilda attempt to draft their version of the “statement”, they are quickly distracted by Maxime’s marriage drama, writing a multi-step plan to reignite passion. Even Sylvain and Japan’s Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), who seem to be working well together, come up with little more than a vague outline that touches on everything from supply-chain issues to climate change, leaving the audience guessing as to what the “crisis” actually is.
Indeed, that’s a major part of the film’s satire. The filmmakers are clearly making a point about modern politicians being ineffectual but verbose. Throughout the film and even as things become more dire, the politicians here never really make decisions. Instead, they stumble about, reacting to external forces while doing nothing to solve them or even really save each other. Rather, everything that happens feels like another weird and unconnected vignette in a series of oddities; none of it even scary enough to really make Rumours a true horror movie. When the characters encounter a giant, seemingly living brain in the middle of the woods, their interactions with it are ultimately anticlimactic. It’s just another meaningless symbol in a film filled with them.
Still, while the characters’ wandering feels more pointless the longer it goes on, they do eventually stumble on other people. And while some of those people are integral to the film’s loose plotting, others—one with a vehicle for potential escape no less—disappear without explanation. When the separated groups of politicians are eventually reunited, the group who encountered the person with the vehicle not only claims that they haven’t seen anyone but don’t explain to either the audience or the other characters how they separated the vehicle from its owner.
In a cheaper, schlockier film, the oversight could seem simply sloppy: a mistake perhaps borne of the filmmakers failing to keep track of too many threads. But Rumours isn’t cheap schlock, it’s a satire with all the prestige trappings. Instead, it’s endemic of the film’s refusal to commit. While the trio of directors give their film the signifiers of both horror and political satire, they’re frustratingly unwilling to follow through on either. Though reanimated bog bodies shuffle around and loom in the shadows, they never actually do anything. The film neither provides explanation for their existence nor lets them menace in a way that allows the film to make good on its initial sense of paranoid dread. The most these seeming zombies ever do is pleasure themselves in front of a fire. Likewise, the film’s political satire is ultimately toothless. While it contains the grandiose posturing and apocalyptic isolation of something like Dr. Strangelove, it lacks that film’s clear sense of stakes or even plot momentum. Real-life G8 member, Russia, feels absent not because the filmmakers are making some sort of statement about the world the film takes place in, but because including them would make the political and personal dynamics too complicated.
Though Rumours has the potential to be an incisive satire of our current global political climate, it ultimately doesn’t even try. Much like the politicians that make up its cast of characters, the film is so busy avoiding being definite that it ends up being utterly weightless. By not committing to a genre or giving its characters much else to do besides wander around and spew faux inspiring yet noncommittal monologues, it does little more than waste its audience’s time. Granted, it’s perhaps the filmmakers’ intention for Rumours to recreate what it feels like to sit in a stagnated geopolitical climate in the face of what feels like an inevitable apocalypse. However, it’s equally likely that it’s deliberately insulting the audience, creating the simplest satire possible and expecting us to guffaw at the obvious absurdity. Either way, it’s appropriate that the film’s most indelible image is of a group of mindless zombies jerking off.
