Despite containing a very bizarre and inventive plot, and despite apparently being about something I couldn't quite discern, I found this movie enjoyable enough – maybe because of its sense of black humour.

A cadre of world leaders from the G7 countries are meeting in the German countryside to convene and issue a statement about some unspecified crisis, all of them so caught up in the messaging of the statement rather than doing anything about said crisis the film seems on the surface to be a satire about political inaction and bureaucracy.

Instead, it takes more time setting up the characters and their situation. As the film begins, their host, German Chancellor Hilda (Cate Blanchett) invites them to view the exhumation of a body from centuries before on the palatial country estate, almost perfectly preserved in the ground peat (and a motif that will return).

But they presently sit down in an ornate gazebo to brainstorm the issue, all of their very human foibles on show.

French Prime Minister Maxime (Roy Dupuis) is holding a candle for his UK counterpart, Cardosa (Nikki Amuka-Bird), after she's broken off an affair he's still invested in, leaving him unfocused and depressed. Italian President Antonio (Rolando Ravello) is so enamoured with the stately US President Edison (Charles Dance - it's alluded to but never explained why he's British) he virtually becomes the other man's lapdog, and so on.

But after they manage to break off into groups to workshop the statement, something goes very wrong. The servers who've been bringing food and booze stop coming, apparently all having fled or vacated the property. Maxime goes off to find his way back to the manor house to see what's gone on, stumbling around the forest, finds nothing, and finds the gazebo trashed and abandoned when he returns.

When he catches up to the rest of the gathering making their way through the woods, they tell him they were attacked by unidentified figures – creatures we're going to learn later are the dead bog bodies the excavation has been digging up, as if they're zombie voters seeking revenge.

It becomes a comedy of errors as the group of clueless world leaders trying to reach some sort of safe haven – either in the house or elsewhere – when it seems like everyone else in the world has vanished.

It's also got to do with an ageing, cynical computer programmer controlling an AI entity from inside the house, sending texts to Maxime posing as a little lost girl needing help, a character who arrives and leaves as soon as he arrives and makes you wonder what he was doing there.

It all ends with what seems like the grand unified theory of what the film is parodying – a politician standing on a balcony passionately orating a missive full of platitudes that actually says nothing to an audience of people who can't even speak, let alone think critically.

It goes in some very strange directions to get there, not all of them narratively successful, but at the very least it says some interesting things about how stupid some people are and how we're all enslaved to the same state of humanity no matter how heavy our responsibilities.