Rumours is a 2024 comedy horror film written and directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson. The film stars Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance, Roy Dupuis, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira, Zlatko BuriÃÂ, and Alicia Vikander.
Rumours had its world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2024. The film received generally positive reviews from critics.
World leaders meet at the G7 at a German hotel to compose a statement about an unspecified crisis, failing to take it seriously. The Canadian Prime Minister is upset that the British Prime Minister won't allow them to rekindle a past affair and ends up trysting with the German Chancellor in the woods instead. After sunset the French Prime Minister returns to the outdoor gazebo where they had been working and dining to inform them of the presence of reanimated bog bodies they had seen excavated earlier in the day, and they also realize due to the absence of their servers all other people have mysteriously vanished.
They venture out to find anyone they can but get lost in the woods beset by thick fog and puzzled by a giant brain only the suddenly Swedish-speaking President of the European Commission (whom none of them can understand) believes will be a game-changer for the world, but in her despair that none of them seem to grasp the gravity of the situation, she sets herself and the brain on fire. Attempting to get a response on the emergency phone line, they reach only an artificial intelligence apparently designed to trap child predators but play along with it in an attempt to find their way back to their hotel.
Once there they meet with the man operating the A.I. who similarly kills himself before they can get any meaningful information from him. Finally they step out onto the balcony and the Canadian Prime Minister reads their grandiose and meaningless statement to an audience of a few bog bodies as the world around them goes up in flames.
A German-Canadian production from Square Peg. Producers on the film are Liz Jarvis for Buffalo Gal Pictures, Philipp Kreuzer for Maze Pictures, and Lars Knudsen for Square Peg. Cate Blanchett joined the cast in October 2023. In January 2024, Alicia Vikander and Charles Dance joined the cast. Principal photography took place in Hungary in October 2023. Filming locations also included Winnipeg in Canada.
The film was selected to be screened out of competition at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere on 18 May 2024. It was also selected for the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024, where it screened under the World Cinema section.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 76% based on 127 reviews, with an average rating of 6.1/10. The site consensus states "A brainy satire that has a ball turning the supposed adults in the room into helpless children, Rumours spins a one-joke premise into a sophisticated riot." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 69 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
The film was named to TIFF's annual Canada's Top Ten list for 2024.