There’s a lot to think about in the teaser trailer for Rumours, which features Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander and, for reasons that are not immediately clear, an oversized brain.

Bleecker Street releases filmmaker Guy Maddin’s politically themed horror-comedy movie in theaters Oct. 18, just ahead of this November’s presidential election. The film premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival and co-stars Roy Dupuis, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Charles Dance, Takehiro Hira, Denis Ménochet, Rolando Ravello and Zlatko Buric.

Rumours centers on the leaders of the seven nations comprising the G7, who meet for their annual summit but get lost in the woods and must still draft a statement addressing a worldwide crisis.

The film’s first released footage does not reveal much about the plot but does tease the terror that lurks in the misty woods as the politicians assess their situation. At one point, a character succinctly exclaims, “A giant brain!”

Maddin wrote and directed the feature with longtime collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson. Producing the film are Liz Jarvis, Philipp Kreuzer and Lars Knudsen, while Blanchett and Ari Aster serve as executive producers.

In her review for The Hollywood Reporter, film critic Leslie Felperin wrote, “Rumours operates on a surrealist plane of its own, making up the rules of its universe as it goes along.”

Felperin continued, “The whole thing sometimes feels like a skit show that just barely holds together until the filmmakers and cast bring it all home for a terrific climactic closure, in which all the buzzwords and banalities get to be rolled up into one triumphant speech shouted into the void as the world burns.”