Ronit J

Rubber (2010) Synopsis:

A homicidal car tire, discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession.

Rubber (2010) Review:

Trust indie films to take the most absurd ideas and make a compelling watch out of them. Funny, self-referential, and weird, Rubber is a film that will attract you with its wacky premise and entertain you with a blend of genre treatments.

No reason

The film opens with a weirdly symbolic shot of a car running over chairs, before a sheriff (played by Stephen Spinella) jumps out of its trunk and delivers a monologue about pointlessness. Referencing several iconic movies and how they all contain plot points that happen for ‘no reason’, Dupieux beautifully sets the tone for the indie film that is to follow.

The audience (not us, but the one gathered to watch a fictional film) looks through binoculars before they settle on Robert, the sentient tire. We get a whole sequence that’s the slasher film equivalent of baby animals learning to walk. Robert slowly learns to roll upright, crush unsuspecting victims, and eventually discovers his psychokinetic powers that let him blow up his victims’ heads. No matter how much you want to assign meaning to these absurd visuals, you’re reminded of the sheriff’s pseudo-intellectual speech of the inherent meaninglessness of many life events.

From there, the film abandons logic to deliver an intentionally substance-less style fest. From nature documentaries to low-budget slasher flicks, Rubber pays tribute to the best of cinema.

Spiralling out of control

It doesn’t take long for Robert to discover a taste for human blood. Particularly Sheila, played by Roxane Mesquida. Sadly, it was around this point where I started losing interest in the film.

The whole sub-plot of the audience spending days watching 2010’s version of brain-rot content, only to get poisoned contained some poignant food for thought. Even Spinella’s character breaking the fourth wall to reveal that the audience is dead and that the characters can go back to real life was absurdly hilarious. However, I didn’t really come here to watch a philosophical film; I’m here to see a sentient tire go on a killing spree.

While the human characters scramble to resolve the issue, Robert is killed. But then, he reincarnates as a tricycle and leads an army of sentient tires to take on Hollywood. For all the ‘no reason’ talk in the opening scene, Rubber makes it hard not to assign meaning to its many artfully symbolic visuals. Yet, somehow, the plot feels like it spiralled out of control around the halfway mark. While Robert grows in the first half, the escalation gets replaced with inane human reactions and meta humour that—in its own right—is really funny, but in the context of the film feels out of place.

The ending—probably because of my slowly losing interest—felt just meh.

Is Rubber (2010) worth the watch?

Depends. If you like self-referential indie films with meta plots and artsy long takes, sure. Rubber has a lot to offer, and I’d recommend it to many of my cinephile friends.

However, Rubber also suffers from indulgent visuals, shoddy writing in the second half, and a noticeable lack of escalation, which results in a wonky emotional graph. A little more focus on the killer tire would have served the film much better than all its meta scenes combined.

In Conclusion:

Rubber (2010) is as absurd as it is creative and funny. However, the film suffers from a lack of focus and a narrative that spirals out of control, much like the titular character. Worth a watch, I’d say, if you’re up for weird indie films with wacky premises and meta humour.

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Have you seen Rubber (2010)? What did you think about this movie? Let me know in the comments below, along with any film recommendations you’d like me to watch/review.

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