Rubber (2010)
★★★ — Rubber (2010)
There is a film where the villain is a tyre. A tyre called Robert. A sentient, murderous tyre who rolls through the Californian desert making people's heads explode with his mind. And that sentence, as deranged as it sounds, does not even begin to cover how strange Rubber actually is.
Right from the off, the film tells you exactly what it is. One of the characters steps forward and delivers a speech about "no reason" as a founding principle of cinema. No reason why E.T. is brown. No reason why the piano in a given scene is out of tune. No reason, in other words, why a tyre should not be your protagonist. It is a provocation, a manifesto and a very funny joke all at once, and it sets the tone perfectly. This is a film that knows precisely what it is doing, even when it looks like it does not.
The first thirty minutes or so are genuinely brilliant. Watching Robert wobble into consciousness, learn to roll, discover his telekinetic rage on a plastic bottle and then work his way up to bigger targets, is an absolute joy. There is real patience to it. The camera watches him the way you might watch an animal documentary, and the film earns genuine laughs and genuine tension in equal measure. It made me think of something like Fantastic Planet (1973), that same willingness to present an utterly alien perspective with a straight face and see what happens.
But here is the problem. The concept, as glorious as it is, cannot quite sustain a feature running time. Around the halfway point, I started to feel it stretch. The meta elements involving a crowd of spectators watching the film's events through binoculars, which is a clever enough device, begin to drag. The jokes about the audience and about cinema itself, which land brilliantly early on, start to feel like they are padding rather than deepening the idea. The film's anarchic spirit keeps you from switching off entirely, but the energy does sag.
My honest feeling is that Rubber would have been perfect as half of a grindhouse double bill. Forty-five minutes, sharper, meaner, no fat on it whatsoever. As a short, this concept is a ten out of ten. As a feature, it is a slightly breathless three.
None of that changes what it is, though. It is absolutely one of a kind. You will not find another film that opens with a philosophical monologue, spends twenty minutes on a tyre learning to move, and then has said tyre check into a motel. The sheer confidence of the whole enterprise is something to behold. The director Quentin Dupieux commits completely, and that commitment is what stops it from feeling like a one-note prank.
Three stars. But here is the thing: it does not matter whether you love it or bounce off it, you will absolutely tell someone else about it. That is rarer than it sounds. Most films disappear from your head the moment you step outside. This one lodges itself somewhere odd and stays there. A tyre called Robert. "No reason." You will be repeating both of those things for weeks, and that counts for something.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-04-13
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