Rubber
Twenty minutes into Rubber you’re going to be shaking your head, utterly bewildered, ready to click it off for good.
Don’t.
It would be a typical horror movie — the serial killer rolls around a desert town blowing off the heads of innocent victims — if our killer wasn’t a telepathic tire. His name is Robert, and he enjoys preying on birds, squirrels and girls. Soon, a local police lieutenant learns about Robert’s path of destruction and begins to track him down.
If the personified tire isn’t strange enough, don’t worry — it gets worse.
There’s a group of spectators on the hill in the distance. They’re watching Robert through binoculars as if they’ve planned to see this movie unfold. Their purpose is never quite explained and eventually all but one die after eating poisoned turkey. The lone survivor, a man in a wheelchair, goes on a mission to seek revenge, but he can’t tread on Robert.
It’s hard to enjoy Rubber if you’re expecting any standards of rationality to be upheld. It’s definitely absurd, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad movie. As a horror-comedy, it successfully weaves witty, ridiculous humor with jump-worthy moments. It’s not exceptionally scary — darker than anything else.
Rubber’s sole purpose is to play with audience expectations and that’s made very clear from the onset. In the opening lines, the sheriff asks, “In the movie E.T., why is the alien brown? No reason. In Love Story, why do the two characters fall madly in love with each other? No reason.”
He continues to throw out various movie scenarios, all with the explanation “no reason.” It appears he’s offering you an answer to the inevitable shock you’ll experience a few minutes later when a tire blows up a small animal.
Rubber doesn’t have the ‘predictable unpredictability’ of horror movies nor is it easily digestible like most comedies. It only promises to confuse you and cause you to re-evaluate your Netflix movie-picking abilities.
And after all that, it’s actually worth watching. Rubber is ridiculous, but that’s what makes it unique. It demands to be appreciated for its extreme out-there-ness that’s not easily found in blockbuster movies. The jokes are subtle but it’s clear the film doesn’t take itself seriously and the audience isn’t supposed to either.
As far as the cinematography is concerned, it’s a well-done and visually interesting movie. The tire’s perspective gives Robert a little more depth as a character and, oddly enough, allows the audience to understand what he’s feeling. The desert setting serves the plot well, and the abandoned landscape and dilapidated buildings make Robert’s doings more eerie and almost, somehow, more believable.
Rubber isn’t instantly likable, but it’s creative and bizarrely captivating. It hasn’t gained much traction in the world of popular movies, but, if you’re tired of boring, Rubber is definitely worth checking out. At the very least, in less than 90 minutes, you’ll have watched something impossible to explain to your grandmother at the next family dinner.
