Politics and the apocalypse collide in Rumours – a horror satire that threatens to steal Megalopolis’ crown as 2024’s most eccentric movie.
When Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis came out earlier this year, opinions were somewhat divided as to whether it was a grand folly, a visionary masterpiece, a piece of demented high camp, or a mixture of all of these.
What most could agree on was that there was nothing else quite like it in 2024’s line-up of movies, whether it was in its unnatural dialogue and bizarre character names (Aubrey Plaza as financial TV reporter Wow Platinum) or its incredibly uneven visuals, which veered from the captivatingly imaginative to the embarrassingly kitsch.
For better or worse, Coppola had managed to finally achieve his goal of creating a vision of the USA as a late Roman empire in danger of tipping over into facism. Which, as 2024 nears its end, now sounds like a timely enough sentiment.
In the eccentric individualism stakes, though, Megalopolis has a competitor: comedy horror Rumours, directed by Canadian filmmaking trio Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. Well, we call it a comedy horror, but Rumours defies easy categorisation; although its premise can be distilled to an elevator pitch, the plot elides unpredictably into apocalyptic satire, gonzo sci-fi, zombie horror and surreal thriller territory.
Read more: Megalopolis review | A towering, steaming pile of art
Still, here’s that elevator pitch: it’s the G7 summit, and as the world’s leaders convene at a luxurious retreat in a leafy part of Germany, the apocalypse begins. Or does it…?
From the birds tweeting over the woozy, jazz infused opening title sequence to the first glimpse of the cast, there are signs that Rumours isn’t playing according to any particular ruleset. Among the world leaders you’ll find Cate Blanchett, putting on a rather suspect teutonic accent as Hilda Ortmann, Chancellor of Germany; she’s contrasted by Charles Dance, who doesn’t bother to put on an American accent at all as the ageing, Joe Biden-like POTUS Edison Walcott.
(At one point, Italian premiere Antonio (Rolando Ravello) tries to ask how the President of the United States could possibly have a British ‘oh dear boy’ way of speaking, but Hilda quickly cuts him off.)
We catch up with Hilda and the other six world leaders as the summit nears its end. The group convenes for an evening meal located beneath a gazebo on the grounds of a sprawling chateau. The specifics of this location are quite important, because the leaders are only a couple of glasses of wine into the evening before the French President (Denis Ménochet) raises the alarm. While they’ve been eating and hashing out the beginnings of a joint statement, everyone else at the chateau has disappeared. Even more scarily, President Broulez claims to have been attacked by the reanimated corpse of an Iron Age man dug up earlier that day.
So begins a bizarre story in which we’re seldom quite sure whether what the group is experiencing is actually happening to them or some sort of collective descent into madness. Certainly, with their neuroses, assorted scandals and affairs, they’re an odd lot to begin with; the filmmakers imagine the G7 leaders as being highly educated yet too incurious, self-interested and lacking in everyday common sense to write a press release, much less govern their respective countries.
Running counter to the conspiracy theories that encircle our planet’s leaders, Rumours suggests that we’re ruled over by people who haven’t a clue what they’re doing. Whether humanity’s threatened by the climate crisis or by AI or something even more outlandish, our leaders have little more to offer in response than platitudes or soundbites. This, again, now sounds like a timely enough sentiment.
There’s a despairing edge to Rumours’ comedy, then, which throws in onanistic zombies, outsized body parts in woodland clearings, and portents of an unspecified apocalypse. In fact, the film’s tone is so uncertain that it’s often hard to figure out whether its technical shortcomings – including some blue screen backdrops that wouldn’t look out of place in Tommy Wiseau’s The Room – are part of the joke, or a by-product of low-budget filmmaking.
Much like Megalopolis, it’s also hard to say whether Rumours is necessarily a good film, exactly, though it’s arguably a fascinating one. It’s fascinating to see award-winning actors like Blanchett, Dance and Alicia Vikander appear in something so unabashedly bizarre. It’s also fascinating to see a film in which a character constantly hands out slices of cooked meat he keeps in his top pocket.
On one hand, Rumours’ satirical handling of what might be an end of the world scenario might place it in the same arena as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove; its execution, all lurid Mario Bava-like colours and flashes of crudity, is more like Zardoz meets Bubba Ho-Tep.
In a quirk of fate, Rumours premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, just two days after Megalopolis. But where the latter had Francis Ford Coppola’s name and reputation to help give it wider media attention, Rumours has – relatively speaking – flown under the radar somewhat.
Currently on a limited release in UK cinemas, it’s worth tracking down; rough around the edges and perhaps a little too eccentric for mainstream audiences, Rumours is nevertheless one of the most unique movies you’ll see this year.
To quote the film’s Japanese Prime Minister (Takehiro Hira), “I don’t understand what we just saw…”
Rumours is out now in UK cinemas.
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