The G7 summit descends into a bizarre fight for survival in this brooding and conceptually brilliant comedy from directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. Maddin is best known for his wonderful, silent-film inspired curios, including My Winnipeg, The Saddest Music In The World and The Forbidden Room, with the Johnson brothers as frequent collaborators. In Rumours, the gang bring things bang up to date in fine satirical style.

Cate Blanchett heads up an eye-catching cast as the German Chancellor, with her nation hosting a gathering of world leaders while Charles Dance is the arrogant, inexplicably English US President, and Nikki Amuka-Bird the UK PM. Denis Ménochet is hilarious playing the petty and insecure President of France, with Roy Dupuis doing some scene-stealing himself as the Canadian premier, a handsome and highly emotional ladies’ man, who turns action hero when the going gets tough. Meanwhile, Rolando Ravello and Takehiro Hira are the leaders of Italy and Japan respectively.

The group have convened to produce a collective statement on an unspecified global crisis. Following some hapless attempts to do so, which veer wildly off course, they’re plunged into a crisis of their own, involving dense fog, marauding bog people and a giant brain. Outrageously entertaining from start to finish, Rumours is the perfect film for our cynical, catastrophe-rich times. It brilliantly mocks the value of such gatherings as it swings between telenovela and B-movie, showing the supposedly all-powerful participants as self-absorbed, socially awkward and entirely lacking in sensible ideas. The cast are superb, whether playing it straight or hamming it up, while the melodramatic score ratchets up the madness, horror, romance and doom. The result is pure absurdist genius.

Rumours screens on Monday 14, Sunday 20 October as part of the BFI London Film Festival; on general release from Friday 6 December.