Last year, I found myself in the National Museum of Ireland staring at the preserved body known as Old Croghan Man. He died a brutal death: strangled, stabbed, decapitated, severed in half at the waist, and drowned. Yet I could see the pores on his skin, the careful manicuring of his fingernails. His final form is rather expressive—an uncanny reminder that what is dead is not always past.
Old Croghan Man is a bog body, one of many naturally mummified corpses found in the raised peat bogs of northern Europe. A combination of high acid, low temperature, and low oxygen preserves hair, skin, and internal organs as the calcium of the bones is leached away. The result is a tanned and shriveled body preserved in remarkable detail.
At some point, perhaps during his final ordeal, Old Croghan Man’s nipples were mutilated as a symbolic gesture, according to Eamonn P. Kelly, the former keeper of Irish antiquities at the museum. This detail is key to a bigger mystery. He was not just any man, but a king, and in ancient Ireland kings were wedded to the land and tasked with ensuring good harvests. Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of fealty, and so “cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship,” in Kelly’s words.
Old Croghan Man may have met his grisly fate because he failed to deliver on his promises to his people, making him unfit to rule as a king in this life or beyond. He was sacrificed to the earth for better harvests to come. There are plenty of theories seeking to explain bog bodies, but only Kelly’s has been embraced by the makers of a new dark comedy film about a fictional G-7 summit.
In Rumours, from renowned Canadian oddball director Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, the leaders of the world’s most advanced economies attend a summit but are soon left to fend for themselves in a dark forest among a horde of reanimated—and horny—bog bodies. The film takes this premise and uses it to skewer the failures and hypocrisies of modern diplomacy.
Cate Blanchett stars as the German chancellor in Rumours.Bleecker Street
Rumours stars Cate Blanchett as the bureaucratic and lustful chancellor hosting the annual G-7 summit at an estate in the idyllic German countryside. Joining her are a couple competent but distractable counterparts: the polite and intelligent British prime minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and the passionate Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis), who downs bottles of wine to forget that he is being driven from office by a rather boring scandal.
The rest of the bunch are either so caught up in idealism or their own intellectualism that they are rendered useless, as is the case with the French president (Denis Ménochet) and the Japanese prime minister (Shogun’s Takehiro Hira), or they are useless from the start, as with the bumbling Italian prime minister (Rolando Ravello) and the nostalgic U.S. president who can’t stay awake (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance).
On a tour of the property, the German chancellor shows the group a recently excavated bog body: that of a former leader also sacrificed for failing to deliver on his promises. His penis has been severed and hung around his neck, and the group looks on with fascination, disgust, and admiration (on the part of the U.S. president). They pose for an awkward photo, ceremonial shovels in hand, but the moment otherwise passes without much thought.
From left: The leaders of France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Canada, and Japan pose with a recently excavated bog body from the Iron Age in Rumours.Bleecker Street
After settling in for dinner at a lakeside gazebo, the group is left alone to draft an outline of a provisional statement on a global crisis. This simple and probably pointless task preoccupies and eludes them for the remainder of the film. With great effort, the group brainstorms a pathetic slate of buzzwords and platitudes. They want to be clear, the German chancellor suggests, but not so clear that they put themselves in an awkward position.
The whole exercise is more a game of diplomatic word association than the kind of critical thought that one would expect from the world’s leaders. They are self-congratulatory about what little they have accomplished, convinced that terms such as “geopolitical issues,” “bilateral,” and “supply chain management” are profound. Though at least the U.S. president recognizes that what people really want is “concrete action, not vague promises or proposals,” this brief self-awareness quickly dissipates; he falls asleep again, and the group carries on.
It is a scathing, if predictable, indictment of the current state of global leadership. The specifics of the crisis at hand are unimportant, left blank as a Rorschach test for the viewer—it could be climate change, genocide, nuclear weapons, or war. Rumours is not a particularly subtle satire, but it’s not trying to be. The obviousness is entirely the point.
Amid this dithering, the group realizes that it has truly been left alone, and a movie about the horrors of diplomacy becomes an outright horror movie. High-minded ideals quickly give way to visceral, bodily fear as the world’s leaders are—literally and figuratively—lost in the woods, trying to escape a horde of reanimated bog bodies masturbating and traipsing through the castle grounds.
In many respects, the group is running from the past. The members of this fictional G-7 pride themselves a bastion of modernity—no longer a club exclusively for old white men. But they are clearly not the visionaries that they imagine themselves to be, merely mimics of culturally sensitive public-relations speak intended to keep the press and protesters at bay: The French president takes great care to proclaim that the bog body could be that of a man or a woman; it’s a man. The Italian is asked whether his meat snack is traditional Genovese salami; it’s from the hotel buffet. One leader wonders what those ceremonial Japanese fans are called; they are just “fans.” When they encounter a diplomat speaking a language they cannot understand, they wonder whether it’s any number of forgotten tongues—Galindian, Skaldian, Ruthenian. It’s Swedish.
Read More
What to Watch When You’re Done Watching Polls
From Chile to Iran to New York’s most mortifying mayoral race, here are nine movies about elections to stream now.
‘The Regime’ Misunderstands Autocracy
HBO’s new miniseries displays an undeniably American nonchalance toward power.
The New York Film Festival Offers a Sneak Peek of the Year’s Best
FP’s critic on the movies you’ll shortly devour.
At every turn, the leaders are more concerned with saying the right thing than doing it. The theme of the G-7 summit is “regret,” and when asked about their biggest regrets, none seem too bothered by their own political failings. The Japanese prime minister says that he regrets not learning to ride horses, while the Italian regrets dressing up like Mussolini for a costume party, but not that much. The Canadian leader effectively gives a land acknowledgement to the bog bodies—offering “profound apologies for the hurt and offense we have caused” —before axing one of them in the face.
This faux handwringing undoubtedly echoes Canada’s recognition of its shameful treatment toward Indigenous peoples. It’s not the only moment that recalls the real world. Other than the fact that he inexplicably speaks with a British accent, the American leader obviously satirizes the United States and, at times, specifically U.S. President Joe Biden. He blathers on about American greatness, falls asleep at critical junctures, isolates himself from the group, and at one point says that he could be president for another hundred years.
Yet the directors seem to chastise viewers for reading much into it. The characters nearly break the fourth wall at one point, when the overly intellectual French president wonders whether it might be “illuminating” to view the situation allegorically. Much of the satire of Rumours is either muddled or just not that deep, and it is tiring to keep up with a movie that oscillates between baiting the audience with seriousness and then mocking them for taking it seriously.
Despite its flaws, Rumours is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly if you’re the kind of person who enjoys jokes where the Treaty of Maastricht is the punchline. It also captures the sense of nihilism that many people, particularly young people, feel toward world leaders and institutions more accurately than anything I’ve seen in recent memory.
The Canadian prime minister finds a fellow diplomat in the woods, as well as a giant brain, in Rumours.Bleecker Street
In this carnival of madness and snark, one choice does feel particularly thoughtful: the bog bodies. Looking at Old Croghan Man was so frightening because of how realistically he was preserved, defying the kind of abstraction usually afforded to zombies, ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, and the like. Forced to really see him in the flesh, you remember that he was once alive, capable of the kind of touch and feel that any of us are.
Rumours portrays its G-7 leaders as inept and out of touch, but it goes to great lengths to characterize them as human. They are not cold and calculating policymaking robots. They feel big feelings and try to run away from them with a glass of wine. They are fussy, distracted, delightable, and emotive. That ancient mummies have come to life and a giant brain has been found in the forest—let alone whatever geopolitical crisis is at hand—ultimately concerns them less than their own marital problems, sexual desires, hunger, and need for sleep.
The G-7 leaders may be running from the bog bodies, but they have nothing to fear because they and the bog bodies are one and the same. The leaders’ bones have dissolved, rendering them spineless. They are jacking off as the world unravels under their stewardship. The question that remains is how long it will take before the leaders of Rumours—clearly unfit to rule—are tossed in the political bogs, an offering to make way for a new generation of leadership more attuned to the problems of this world.