Rubber (2010)
★★★ — Rubber (2010)
There are films that wear their genre labels comfortably, and then there are films that seem to exist purely to make you question why genre labels were invented in the first place. Rubber, released in 2010 and co-produced between France and the United States by Realitism Films, is very much the latter. The premise is stated plainly and without apology: a discarded car tyre in the California desert becomes sentient, develops telekinetic powers, and begins killing things. A group of spectators watches from a hill through binoculars. The tyre, meanwhile, takes an interest in a young woman passing through. That is the film. It runs to a brisk 82 minutes, which, as you will find, still manages to feel like both too long and precisely the right length depending on which stretch you are in.
Behind the camera is Quentin Dupieux, the French filmmaker and musician who records electronic music under the name Mr. Oizo. Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited the film himself, a degree of sole authorship that feels entirely in keeping with something this wilfully odd. His background in music videos and his fondness for absurdist provocation are worn openly here. The cast includes Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, David Bowe, Roxane Mesquida, and Thomas F. Duffy, a mix of character actors and less familiar faces who are asked, with apparent sincerity, to treat all of this as completely normal. It is a film that has drawn comparisons to meta-cinema experiments and low-budget exploitation fare in equal measure, sitting somewhere between a film-school provocation and a late-night cult curiosity. If you enjoy films that push at their own edges, you might also want to look at Salaam Cinema, another comedy reviewed here that plays games with the machinery of filmmaking itself, or Cigarette, a short comic piece that similarly finds humour in the stripped-back and the strange. For something from the same decade with a very different energy but an equally committed genre sensibility, there is also the review of The Raid 2, another 2010s film covered on the blog.
Rubber arrived on the festival circuit to a reaction that was, politely, mixed. Admirers praised its commitment to the bit and its refusal to explain itself. Detractors felt that a single joke, however well-executed, could only sustain so much. The film's tagline, "Are you TIRED of the expected?", tells you everything about the register it is operating in. It is a film that knows exactly what it is doing, which is either reassuring or maddening depending on your patience for self-aware absurdism. French cinema has produced some genuinely left-field work over the decades, and for a broader sense of its range, the blog's coverage of Sugar Cane Alley, another French production reviewed here, is worth a look as a useful counterpoint in tone and ambition.
You will never see a movie quite like this. Right from the beginning with one of the characters breaking the 4th wall and signifying an homage to the "no reason" you know that film is going to be something utterly different. It starts off great. The first 30 minutes or so with the title character, Robert, a sentient murderous tyre, learning to move and blow stuff up, is great. Quickly though it does wear thin (no pun intended) and I feel like this probably should have been a grindhouse-esque double feature. 45 minutes each. Trust me though, when you watch this, it's something you'll tell other people about.
That last point about it being best suited to a double feature format is one I keep coming back to. There is a version of Rubber that works perfectly as the second half of a grindhouse night, paired with something equally deranged, where its momentum never gets the chance to stall. As a standalone 82-minute sit, the middle section does ask a fair bit of you. But honestly, the opening stretch alone earns it a place in the conversation, and I have already recommended it to more people than I expected to. Sometimes that is enough. A film does not need to be perfect to be worth talking about, and this one is absolutely a talking-about kind of film.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-04-13
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Rubber (2010) on YouTube
Where to watch (US)
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More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
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