Rubber

On one hand Rubber is an entirely familiar exercise a stalker/killer road movie genre film spanning a desert road trip filled with classic elements right down to the girl watched by the villain in shower during a motel stop.  Though it stretches the conventions of the form somewhat by casting the killer as a discarded tire who becomes sentient with the psycho-kinetic powers to make people's head explode.  Yes, a tire - as in the thing on your car.  And that's not the most unusual part of the film...

The film opens along a dessert road.  A set of chairs are assembled in a hodgepodge fashion.  Enter a police car that seems to go out of it's way to knock over every chair there.  From the trunk pops an officer speaking directly to the audience about how the point of the picture is that life and movies are filled with "no reason" giving a series of increasingly ridiculously funny examples.  Then as if to prove his point he gets back into the trunk and departs.  The camera moves back for us to meet a group of people who are there to watch the movie (or perhaps the filming) of the tire live and in person.  Things continue to get progressively weirder as the tire comes to life and the interactions with the "audience" develop and merge into a story, albeit one based on "no reason."

When one reads the above description it's easy to think that this exercise could come across as trying to hard to be quirky.  But it totally worked for me.  It is odd, and funny - but for some reason never quite crossed the line to the ridiculous.  Now of course it may help if when you read the description "a tire comes to life and gains the power to make people's heads explode" and thing "hey, now that's a movie I would be interested in hearing more about".  I'll admit I probably shouldn't try to convince you to see it if that's not your first reaction.  That said, it's not a film whose main point is the exploding head scenario (though it it in there for sure).  Though don't worry, heads do explode.

Director Quentin Dupieux has really made a very entertaining masterful film that both looks and plays very well.  This is one of my top picks from Fantastic Fest even though I haven't officially compiled a list yet.  I can't imagine this being a huge box office hit - so if it makes an appearance near you, I highly recommend jumping on the opportunity to see it.  It really is very well shot - so it absolutely will benefit from not being watched on your small computer screen.  You can get a quick sense of the film from the trailers below.





Screening Notes:

I saw this film at Fantastic Fest in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse theater.  This was one of two screenings where the chef of the theater produced a small appetizer for everyone in the audience with a theme in keeping with the film.  As in the other case which I'll writeup later (Fatso) the snack was an allusion to something in the film a bit unpleasant.  Though the fried chicken leg we were served was delicious - it was an amusingly unsettling choice once I thought about it after the film.  Thankfully it didn't seem to have the same effect as the turkey on some of the onscreen audience members.

Afterward there was a box of promotional rubber "rubbers" in multiple colors available.  They really had nothing to do with the film's content - just the play on words.  But always nice to see a festival worried about safe sex.  ;-)

More notably Mondo Tees had some custom posters for the film in their standard high quality style.  I couldn't resist picking up this limited run lime green one pictured here.