‘Rumours’ is an outrageously weird piece of filmmaking, deliberately blending two very different styles to create a satirical, sharp and surreal exposition of political manoeuvring involving the world’s elite at a G7 summit in Germany mixed with the sort of tropes that define the horror and zombie genre. The leaders of the G7, including Charles Dance as a British-sounding American President and Cate Blanchett as the Chancellor of Germany, are so pre-occupied with their own personal jockeying for power at a lavish summit at which they are expected to produce a form of words that enable them to encapsulate the essence of their meeting at which they are responding to an unspecified global crisis.

When the journalists and hospitality staff disappear, the leaders find themselves stuck together and quite unable to agree on strategies and who are not only disdainful when it comes to finding the energy to put together a joint statement but also lack the competence and wherewithal to implement it. What follows is a darkly satirical comedy, similar to Armando Iannucci’s ‘The Death Of Stalin’, in which we see political giants with the same unhinged, inappropriate and off-kilter sensibilities as anyone else now that those responsible for keeping them in check are no longer on the scene. There is a power vacuum and it becomes filled with the egos of everyone at the summit, some of whom, like the leaders of Germany and Canada, run off together into the forest for a sexual liaison, and where the British Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) avoids being alone with her Canadian counterpart because she doesn’t feel safe around him.

We even hear the American President rueing the fact that he is bound by the clause in the Constitution which limits a President to serving two terms, saying that he feels like he should be going on for the next one hundred years, only in a scene or two later to be ready to die in the forest as he is unable to keep up with the younger contingent around him. The film then veers into full blown absurdist, apocalyptic territory with masturbating zombies and a giant brain in the middle of the forest floor which appears to have brainwashed – quite literally – the Secretary-General of the European Commission who is speaking the language of gibberish… only for one of the German Chancellor to put two and two together and realize that she is talking in Swedish.

Mixed with an unnerving sequence about the probability of the world’s leaders comprising paedophiles as being greater than that of the general population, ‘Rumours’ is awash with fragments that admittedly don’t all hold together all that convincingly but which is good at making us question the calibre and wisdom of those elected representatives who in a different era, and certainly at a time of crisis, would be revered as sages. Indeed, we wonder here whether the intergovernmental conference, which is designed to produce rhetoric when action is needed, has any utility in a digital age.