Robert is a tire. Robert is in the ground. Robert gains a consciousness and decides he doesn’t want to be rubble. Robert gets up and starts rolling down the road. He blows things up with its will. It squashes bugs. Now that it’s caught the eye (?) of a gorgeous young traveler, Robert is rolling down after her and is intent on garnering her attention.
Why? No reason.
Does there have to be a reason?
In this day and age where modern film feels as if it has to include a reason and motivation and string of logic for every single villain in cinema history, it’s refreshing to see a film merely stop and tell us “This is your villain of the day. He has no reasoning. He just is a destructive force of nature.” Fans of movies that de-mystify any sense of pure evil will find “Rubber” to be a movie that just is. And nothing more. It introduces an antagonist just to introduce one, but from the outset I loved it for the simple fact that it’s honest about its intentions in being a practice in nonsense and openly admits that with a wonderful prologue, and then sets the stage for a movie within a movie.
It’s a movie about a force of nature telling a story to an audience of desert onlookers with binoculars. They travel there to watch “the movie,” and after being given one of the most incredible monologues I’ve heard in years, they seek out the fortune and ill gotten gain of Robert the Tire. All the while dealing with one another in the desert landscape watching the tire wreak havoc. It blows up birds because it can. It blows up rabbits because it feels like it. And surely enough he garners an affection for a young woman who wanders around aimlessly, traveling for reasons we’re never explained.
Meanwhile in the desert our intrepid watchers watch “the movie” with us through high power binoculars indulging in arguments, assorted bickering, and even manage to tear apart a cooked turkey like a scene ripped directly from “Night of the Living Dead.” “Rubber” has originality going for it and because of that it gets points for trying something that has never been accomplished before while breaking the fourth wall in a way of showing how fiction can sometimes take on a life of its own and break the barrier between reality and fiction when the spectator has decided they’re not ready to stop believing in the piece of art. “Rubber” is the very definition of the counter culture film. It goes to every length to be the anti-horror film and merely just a form of performance art, and through that it succeeds in a grand scale. It’s an original and refreshing bit of horror that is tough to peg down and I loved it.