DVD REVIEW: Rubber

Rubber
Director: Quentin Dupieux
Starring: Wings Hauser
(out of 5)

Here’s a film about a rubber tire mired in the desert sands that becomes perversely animated, filled with some life-force that seems to give the round and rolling object a consciousness a sense of purpose - ultimately turning it into a killer tire. It starts off slow, breaking bottles and small animals before moving on to the ultimate prey - humans.

It kills by harnessing some form of psychokinetic power, revving up and gyrating, and then making people’s heads explode - just like Cronenberg’s 1981 splatter fest Scanners. All of this aberrant behaviour is being watched by a group of people through binoculars, one of whom is the gnarly action star of the 1980s, Wings Hauser. Somehow their watching and the tire’s murderous perambulations are entwined, a comment perhaps on the nature of spectacle and moral disengagement - but then, maybe not.

Which is the main problem with this strange film: there are no reasons for anything that happens. In fact, it begins with my most hated of filmic tropes - the breaking of the fourth wall. A cop stares at the camera and gives a soliloquy about 'no reason', how movies often have absolutely no logic or meaning - that things happen for no reason. Which is fine, except the film attempts to make existentialist comments - the tire as metaphor.

Director, Monsieur Duplex (or Mr. Oizo when he makes abstract techno records), puts so much into the languid, if not loving, filming of his tire; the early morning sun bouncing from its rotund form, its travels from A to B enriched with cinematic meaning. Well, it just clashes with that whole no reason diatribe, as do the references to Hitchcock (perhaps the master of the ‘no reason’ film - witness The Birds), and other thriller directors.

Rubber is an art movie disguised as a B-movie, the tire similar to the creatures that inhabited the monster film cycle of the 1950s, but filmed and themed with philosophical intent. Certainly interesting but confused over what it is trying to say and how it is said.

Rubber Trailer

By Kerry Buchanan