Review: Rubber

Rubber, believe it or not, is real. A trailer for the film made its way across the internet a couple months ago, and it seemed much more likely to be a film-school joke than an ad for a real, extant film. A bunch of folks insisted it was, in fact, a joke. The premise was simple: a car tire has come to some kind of life, and is rolls through the desert killing people. It kills people by concentrating really hard (you can tell the tire is concentrating because it starts to shake and make weird noises) and then the person's head explodes. It'd be Scanners, except about… a tire. 

Thankfully, bizarrely, gloriously, the film exists. The product of Quentin Dupieux (better known as DJ Mr. Oizo), the film is in fact about a tire - named Robert - that terrorizes a small desert town. You heard me. Yep. It's Scanners, except about a tire. 

Rubber film introduces itself, its players and its raison d'être, in an absurdist gem of an opening sequence. A sheriff (Stephen Spinella) clambers, for no reason, out of the trunk of a car that has, for no reason, meticulously knocked down a bunch of chairs placed for no reason in the desert. He explains to the camera that the film is dedicated to the most stylish notion of "no reason", highlighting the essentially arbitrary nature of cinema. Why can't the murderer in a genre piece be a tire? No reason why not, it seems, and as Robert the tire rises from the dust and bumps and rolls its way throug the desert, the film slowly begins to breathe into a kind of ludicrous, glorious life. The tire, which is animated by puppeteers and sent careening with a bizarrely intentional mixed-ride/stroll of impossible intention - how is this rolling tire choosing where to go - and loopy, wobbly doe-on-ice carelessness, quickly feels enough like a real villain that you kind of do sit back and buy in to the whole ridiculous endeavour. The tires motion, the mise en scene, the breezy beauty in the convertible, the sound and the light conjure forth such strong genre feelings that while you never forget that the bad guy is a tire you certainly begin to... kind of be afraid of the f**king tire. 

At least as much, that is, as the film lets you. It's a film like last year's Exit Through the Gift Shop, or a much better version of Sucker Punch - it works to get you to accept its absurd bill of goods, and manages to work well enough through sheer craft, while periodically stopping short to point out to you that you've been watching with real trepidation a tire stalk a maid across a parking lot, and that that is weird, and that you are weird for doing that.

Rubber either going to drive you nuts or, if you're like me, make you laugh your ass off. It's kind of on-the-nose, it's self conscious, it's obnoxious and it's deeply weird for the sake of being deeply weird, but it's also very funny, very well acted, and while its reflexive movie-about-movies thing isn't brand new by any means, it feels fresh and interesting, at the very least, and like the product of some small group of neat people with an idea rather than a scheme, and that is by far the best part. 8/10