In Guy Maddin's latest film, Rumours, Cate Blanchett gets to flex her comedic muscle as host of a bamboozled G7 summit

With its cosmically masturbating corpses and a gigantic brain that looks like something out of 1950s sci-fi, Cate Blanchett's new film is the kind of thing you might have once encountered on an obscure cable TV channel in the early hours — only to wake up the next day wondering whether it was all a strange, overly lucid dream. Set in an off-kilter world where Western leaders have assembled for the G7 summit — in a quaint little gazebo by a German lake — Rumours is an oddity that's almost impossible to categorise. Elsewhere, the G7's statement becomes a nonsensical collage of cobbled-together lines — including Kurt Cobain's suicide-note sign-off — intended to skewer the general pointlessness of the occasion. Director Guy Maddin told IndieWire: "The brain is made of Styrofoam base and a layer of squishy latex and a bunch of flammable material.” It all becomes a little repetitive, if not outright tiresome, at a certain point — once the filmmakers' relentless pursuit of the strange starts to outpace the flimsiness of their satire.