The strangest thing about Guy Maddin’s Rumours, co-directed with frequent collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, might just be how relatively ordinary it feels. Eschewing the primitive style for which the Winnipeg filmmaker developed a following, as well as the nesting-doll structure of The Forbidden Room, his latest stages its genre-inflected political satire—one that’s equal parts Luis Buñuel and John Carpenter—in a surprisingly straightforward fashion. Maybe that’s because, despite still featuring a host of odd sights like a giant glowing brain in the woods, the film’s timely subject matter and heightened and portentous atmosphere reflects reality in an all too down-to-earth manner.

Rumours is set at a G7 summit, that oft-protested gathering of leaders of some of the world’s wealthiest democracies, during which they put on a show of global unity, if nothing else, given the summit’s lack of verifiable, concrete, real-life outcomes.