Rumours
Directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson
Certificate 15
109 minutes
Released 6 December

Jesus spoke of ‘wars and rumours of wars’, and told us to give our leaders their due. He also spoke of the End of the Age. In our post-Christian 21st century, half the world supposedly runs under democracy, government by the people. Capitalism is driving corporate and individual financial greed towards burning up the planet – or at least its human population – through climate change. It does not look good.

The leaders of the G7 nations, the seven richest nations on the planet, meet regularly to try and hammer out statements to help the world deal with this impending crisis. There is a widespread feeling among their citizens that the resulting diplomatic agreements achieve nothing, and disaster inevitably looms.

In Rumours’ fictional G7 summit in Germany, the seven world leaders, German Chancellor Hilda Orlmann (Cate Blanchett), British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nicky Amuka-Bird), Canadian PM Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), US President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), Italian PM Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello), French Premier Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet) and Japanese PM Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), divide up into twos and threes like congregation members at a discussion after a sermon and attempt to come up with an appropriate statement to deliver to the world to get the ball rolling, or rolling faster.

However, they are only human and, as such, subject to the same foibles as the rest of us. Alcoholism, sex addiction, senility, trance-like visions, subservience, and even language problems all play their part in ensuring that our representatives, for all their articulate erudition, are completely out of touch with what’s going on and have very little to say about it.

Events move on, with the weather changing from bright sunlight to darkness shrouded in green mist, with bog people mysteriously appearing in the landscape to be viewed by the seven as protestors or terrorists, as if there were no difference between the two. There is also a mysterious, giant, Volkswagen-sized brain. The leaders trying to sort out the apocalypse have been surprised by its occurrence.

We are commanded to pray for our leaders. This film reminds us of just how much they need it.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. His website is jeremycprocessing.com

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This is an extract from an article published in the December 2024/January 2025 edition of Reform

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