Obsessed with the 2026 Olympic Curling Scandal? Try the Canadian Cult Classic ‘Men with Brooms’

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On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: Curling Is Very Serious Business

As the 2026 Winter Olympic Games come to a close this weekend, it’s important to remember the spirit of sportsmanship underpinning each and every competition at this high level. But personal ethics hit differently in the world of curling, where honesty is enforced as much by a sense of community and honor as any official referee or rulebook.

SINNERS, Michael B. Jordan (left), 2025. © Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

This year, that culture of nobility was stress-tested in spectacular fashion when both of the Canadian curling teams were accused of “double-touching” the stone. That’s an illegal move that, in another sport, might barely register. Here, it’s detonated into a full-blown international obsession. The Canadian men’s team heads into a gold-medal match against Britain tomorrow, while the Canadian women’s team faces off with the U.S. for bronze.

Simultaneously absurd and deadly serious, watching a cheating scandal in curling as an outsider feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event. But anyone familiar with Canadian cult cinema knows this is a slippery slope the big screen has been down before. Enter “Men with Brooms” (2002), the perfect companion piece to the Milano Cortina games that understands curling and its peculiar moral ecosystem better than most NBC and Peacock pundits.

Molly Parker, Paul Gross, Leslie Nielsen, 2002. ©Serendipity Point Films/courtesy Everett Collection

Directed by and starring Paul Gross, the film centers on a group of small-town friends reunited after the strange death of their beloved coach. Years earlier, the four curlers (known collectively as a “rink”) had a real shot at winning the Golden Broom in their local championship. That was, until star player Chris Cutter (Gross) vanished. Why turn on your teammates? Turns out, Chris lied about touching a stone mid-play and has quietly poisoned every victory and memory the team has enjoyed since.

Sure, curling is just shuffleboard for people who have ice skates and manners. But it’s also an Olympic mainstay that can lead you to global glory, and those stakes are fully felt in the tonally unhinged “Men with Brooms” script. Players slide 40-pound stones toward a target while their teammates sweep frantically to control its speed and direction, and Gross does the same with a cast that gives it all.

As Cutter’s mushroom-growing dad and reluctant replacement coach, Leslie Nielsen commits to broad physical comedy with fearless enthusiasm. (Yes, there is a cow. No, it’s not… dignified). And the movie’s sincerity never wavers, helped enormously by Molly Parker, who grounds the chaos with genuine emotion and a timeless radiance that suggests the success she’d see in her later work.

Revisiting it now, amid Olympic outrage, “Men with Brooms” plays like both a curiosity and a key to understanding an unusual culture we only amplify on occasion. Curling scandals look melodramatic from the outside because the margins are microscopic. But from the inside, they’re existential and have the power to define who you are, on and off the ice, for years. —AF

Stream “Men with Brooms” (2002) for free through The CW.

The Bite: Oh, Canada!

One of my niche media interests, built from a childhood spent binging “Degrassi” on Teen Nick, has been the tiny world that is the Canadian TV industry. Before “Heated Rivalry” taught Americans what Crave is and helped the country’s cultural stocks soar through the moon, I found a lot of pleasure in the distinct vibes of Canadian productions: the obvious low budget, the strangely specific lighting, the scrappy charm that feels a little less restricted than your average American network show. And once you’ve watched one modern Canadian show, you’ve pretty much seen them all: to say there’s a limited repertoire of actors in the country is being generous.

I first encountered Paul Goss, the visionary behind the strange journey that is “Men with Brooms,” via “Slings & Arrows,” the terrific three-season comedy series following the struggles of an annual Shakespeare festival. The show is mostly known in the States for launching the career of Rachel McAdams, but it can’t be understated how incredible Goss, playing the festival’s temperamental artistic director, is in it, a fraying bundle of nerves and passion that threatens to collapse on himself at any moment.

With that said, and perhaps because my Winter Olympic interests have generally been confined to figure skating, the knowledge that before “Slings & Arrows” Goss made a hyper-specific sports comedy about dirtbag curlers, a genre of man that apparently exists within Canada. The results generally play like a feature-length Canadian sitcom — to the extent that it actually did get a TV spinoff — in its direction, production values, and bizarre folksy milieu.

The results truly need to be seen to be believed — a film often at odds with itself in its tonally confused comedy and strangely dramatic romantic story arcs. And yet as I watched I found myself taken with it, and its gently wry and oh-so Canadian humor, anyway.

Part of the charm of “Men With Brooms” is its cast, who play broad archetypes but are likable enough that you still find yourself rooting for them. Goss is playing a very similar character to his “Slings & Arrows” part here, a prodigal son returning to this world for redemption after the death of his mentor figure, but he’s on a more wounded, sad boy register here that still proves plenty appealing. The women in this movie are pretty uniformly underwritten, but “Deadwood” star Molly Parker manages to make her role as the girl-next-door curling coach’s daughter work despite its limitations.

Best of all, this film has Leslie Nielsen, playing the curmudgeonly father of Goss’ Chris. For those who only know him from “The Naked Gun,” he’s in a completely different mode here, playing a down-to-Earth, gruff but loving dad, whose intense training of this misfit team is funny in part because…well, because he’s training them in curling. Much of this film gets a kick out of contrasting the relative lack of glory the sport offers with the intensity of genre conventions: the bombastic Scottish pipes, the epic nature shots, the crazy entrance of Olympian and chief antagonist Alexander “The Juggernaut” Yount (an amusingly and specifically Canadian parody of flashy American cockiness).

And yet, “Men With Brooms” never mocks the sport, either. When Nielsen gives a rousing speech about how “curling has been a game of the people,” how it has forgone materialism, and how anyone can succeed in it, there’s clear affection for this niche, lovely little game. By the end, after watching this ragtag bunch of misfits pull through and achieve their dreams, it made me want to tune in to some Olympic curling while there’s still time — even if what’s going on in Milan isn’t anywhere near as folksy and charming as what Long Bay, Ontario has to offer. —WC

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