By Peter Keough

Few other films this year will match the absurd satiric heights of director Guy Maddin’s Rumours.

Rumours. Directed by Guy Maddin. At the Boston Common, the Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, the Kendall Square, and the suburbs.

A gaggle of confused world leaders, Charles Dance and Cate Blanchett among them, confer in Rumours. Bleeker Street

Though it might be his most mainstream offering to date, Guy Maddin’s Rumours is not likely to have wide audience appeal (there were two other people in the audience when we saw it on its opening weekend). Nor is it likely to satisfy the fans of the sui generis Canadian creator of madcap flights such as The Saddest Music in the World (showcasing Isabella Rossellini sporting glass prosthetic legs filled with beer), Cowards Bend the Knee (in which a glimpse into a sperm cell’s dream life reveals a Winnipeg Maroons hockey game), and My Winnipeg (including Kafkaesque episodes from an apocryphal local TV show called Man on a Ledge). Most disappointingly, its attitude of cynical resignation and blasé despair at today’s dire world situation fails to rise to the occasion.

Nonetheless, few other films this year will match the absurd heights of two male world leaders debating whether the giant human brain they have happened across in the woods is that of a woman because it is smaller than a man’s giant brain might have been. Even the cheap jokes, such as the recurrent shot of a voluminous American flag napkin tucked into the collar of the US President, got me laughing.

Set during a G7 conference at a castle in Saxony, it features the heads of the seven leading democracies – German chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), American President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), French President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), Japanese PM Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), and Italian PM Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello) — who are tasked with drafting a joint statement on an unspecified world crisis.

But before getting down to the hard work at hand, Hilda, being from the host country, suggests a surprise detour. Archaeological excavators have turned up the corpse of a 2000-year-old bog person, a murder victim who has been perfectly preserved except that the bones have dissolved. The researcher digging him up points out that his penis has been cut off and tied around his neck, prompting the pedantic Sylvain, who is writing a book about ancient burial customs, to observe that it was customary in those days to ritualistically murder leaders; they were “sacrificially murdered for failing to deliver on the promise of a good harvest.” After this ominous and unappetizing excursion, the group heads to the gazebo to have lunch and perform their duty.

The giant brain in Rumours. Is it male or female? Photo: Bleeker Street

Anyone who has been on a committee trying to generate some boilerplate verbiage about something inconsequential will sympathize with the group’s struggles to put together coherent, anodyne, and meaningless sentences. But that is just the beginning of their troubles. Maxime, who looks like a silver-maned Fabio and who, apparently, has had his way with every woman in the G7, is in a funk because his previous conquest, Cardosa, has dumped him. But that contretemps fades in urgency when, before you can say The Exterminating Angel, the normal routines of existence dissolve and the links to the outside world vanish.

What follows is a nocturnal flight that recalls in its lack of thrills Ishana Shyamalan’s misbegotten The Watchers and in its banality of ideas the earnest 1989 TV movie A Walk in the Woods, all with tinted, misty backlighting care of Maddin’s own Vertigo homage, The Green Fog (2017). Maddin’s irrepressible penchant for the often hilarious non sequitur makes the proceedings worth watching. Some of the anomalies are acknowledged but few are explained, as when someone asks the President why he has a British accent and he is interrupted before he can answer. And then there are the resurrected bog people who salute the fleeing world leaders by howling at them and jerking off.

The ultimate non sequitur, though, is the end of days allusion in the title which, if not the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, presumably refers to the Gospel passage in Matthew 24:6-13 that reads, “And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” True believers have taken this as call to double down in their efforts to turn the intensifying world crises into their vision of a Christian Nationalist utopia. Maddin, it seems, takes it as a sign to give up.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).