Quentin Dupieux's Rubber (2010)

Comic horror. A post-modern film within a film about the non-reality of film? A scathing comment not just on the cinematic experience but an attack on the audience itself? Maybe not.

The French Wikipédia entry for Quentin Dupieux, aka musician and DJ Mr Oizo (a pun, of course, on oiseau) states that he said 'il n'y a rien de plus beau dans l'art que de ne pas réfléchir' ('nothing is more beautiful in art than not thinking'), and the beginning bears this comment out. After Le Comptable (the 'accountant' Jack Plotnick) hands out binoculars to spectators watching the making of the film, Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) reels off a list of things in films which are done for no reason, saying by extension that this film has no meaning: just relax and enjoy the experience, which is surely what cinema – life itself? – is all about.

This film concerns a car tyre which slowly comes alive and begins to learn what's happening around it, at first falling down before it learns how to roll properly, then making its way along towards the road. The name is Robert and he discovers he can squash a plastic bottle in his way by just rolling over it, but he has to develop psycho-kinetic powers by breaking a bottle, then blows up a rabbit and a crow he doesn't like the look of before he continues to the road, his natural habitat. He makes his progress towards psychopathic killer status by blowing the head off a motorist who's had the effrontery to drive him off the road, but seems to like the looks of Sheila (Roxane Mesquida) when she takes a shower in a motel: indeed, one of the spectators wonders if they'll have sex, and the woman next to her suggests rubber Robert might get a blow job.

Slowly, the cops realise that they have a serial killer on their hands and put a dummy Sheila laden with explosives outside a door of the motel while Robert is watching – naturally – a racing match on TV. But he just blows the dummy's head off and doesn't come near the explosives, so Chad boldly just goes into the room and shoots the tyre, throwing the harmless rubber remains to the only surviving spectator: the man in the wheelchair (Wings Hauser). But Robert has reincarnated into a tricycle and – after blowing the man and his wheelchair to bits – continues his way down the road, where he picks up several tyre followers rolling on behind him.

Some comments (professional and amateur) have suggested that this would have made a decent short, that it doesn't have enough substance for a feature, and Chad (speaking for Dupieux?) tries to stop the film halfway as he says it's over and anyway it's not real. Personally I didn't find it at all tyring.