Rumours

15 | ★★★✩✩

With a cast led by Cate Blanchett the first impression given by this genre-defying film is that of a disaster movie populated by world leaders. And it is. A G7 summit has convened on German soil. The host is Chancellor Hilde Orlmann (Blanchett) who welcomes her fellow alpha politicans to Dankerode Castle in whose grounds she has built a gazebo where, wined and dined, they can address an undefined world crisis.

Any hopes that the meeting will be gatecrashed by North Korean commandos or a falling meteor are confounded by mud-slathered zombies and the giant brain the group encounter as they attempt to escape a sense of threat and make their way at night through a foggy forest.

Created by visionary (or should that be hallucinating) writer/directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, the idea of world leaders being as fallible and flawed as the rest of us is exhilarating. But only until it emerges that this is the only point the film has up its sleeve.

When exactly that moment of realisation arrives is difficult to say. Most of the time we are too busy enjoying the adolescent resentment of Canada’s leader (Roy Dupuis) for being jilted by Britain’s prime minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird), or decoding the meaning of the giant brain discovered in woods.

The mysterious brain

More disconcerting still is the AI programme that attempts to entrap paedophiles by impersonating children’s texts. Meanwhile, the French president has become immobile and has to be transported on a wheelbarrow and the American president (Charles Dance who inexplicably speaks with his own British accent) boorishly regales his fellow leaders with tactics until he loses the will to live and decides to sit on the forest floor until he expires.

By the time film ends you may know how he feels. But for the most part the intrigue keeps you going.