I suppose one would classify Rumours as a comedy, but it honestly does not have a lot of moments that will gets its audience openly laughing. What it does bring is a lot of moments that are very strange, and deeply absurd. It will potentially lead to a lot of thoughtful nods among viewers, each thinking that elements are amusing but never quite enough to be vocal about it. More common thoughts will likely be ‘what am I watching?’, ‘whose idea was this?’, and ‘are those zombies furiously masturbating?’

Going from third to first, the answer to these questions are respectively yes, filmmakers Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, and an absurdist satire about the world ending during a G7 leader’s summit.

Cate Blanchett plays Hilda Ortmann, the German Chancellor whose government is hosting the last annual leaders summit of the G7: the seven richest liberal democracies in the world. Seated around the table are: Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupois), a deeply depressed Canadian Prime Minister; Edison Wincott (Charles Dance), an elderly US President; Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), France’s portly President; Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Britain’s nervous PM; Tatsuro Iwasaki (Hira Takehiro), Japan’s earnest leader; and Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), Italy’s deeply under-confident PM. They assemble for a working dinner, ostensibly to draft as non-committal a joint statement as possible, and when they emerge the summit is empty of people and there is no way to contact the outside world.

It is a superbly acted film, with each of the seven leads developing distinctive and amusing characters. By and large it avoids indulging in cultural stereotypes as well, which would be an obvious pitfall for this kind of production. The pace, however, is slow, and after teasing a mystery over where everybody else at the summit has gone the film spends more time on political leaders bickering in a forest. What saved the film for me was all of the idiosyncratic elements that are peppered across it: the aforementioned zombies, Alicia Vikander’s sudden appearance as the President of the European Commission, giant brains, and how Charles Dance plays the American President without bothering to affect an American accent.

In many ways the film reminded me of fellow Canadian production Pontypool, which plays out a zombie outbreak from the confines of a small town radio station, and the two films share a lot in the way of low-key absurdism. Rumours, however, is simply nowhere near as good. By the film’s conclusion it all feels somewhat weak, as if its three directors had simply become bored of making it.

It will find its fans, but Rumours definitely appeals to a specific set of tastes. For everybody else it will seem pointlessly “arty” and hopelessly self-indulgent. I enjoyed it, but in all honesty nowhere near as much as I had expected. Everyone’s mileage is going to vary.