Rumours

It is in many ways Guy Maddin's most mainstream film.

If some viewers can still cling onto The West Wing as a comfort watch... there’s something to be said for the appeal of a text offering the total flip side in its portrayal of centrism’s capabilities, especially one as full of punkish spirit as this.

If you like your satire incisive you should perhaps look elsewhere, but the state of the world looks even more laughably absurd through Maddin and the Johnsons’ wickedly warped lens.

With the age of globalism seemingly creaking to a close, there is something wildly mordant about Rumours — a portrait of the last technocrats, still talking bilateral supply chain management as the skies crack open.

It’s about the weaknesses of liberal democracies, which is a timely subject. Yet the punches do not land.

Although the script is aiming to mine some high-grade nonsense out of this promising scenario, it’s not up to the job, no matter how bizarre it gets.

An amusing satire about how politics is more concerned with form than with being useful to the people. [Full review in Spanish]

Common thoughts will likely be ‘what am I watching?’, ‘whose idea was this?’, and ‘are those zombies furiously masturbating?’

In the words of Lindsey Buckingham, Rumours is a film which, sometimes to its detriment, goes its own way - and yet it's so strangely, comically unique, one can certainly appreciate an awkwardness...

I found it a functional means of laughing at the current state of democratic nations, because any other analysis of the topic is just depressing.