Rated R

Inanimate threats are certainly no strangers to cinema. A list of improbably anthropomorphized movie bad guys that includes dolls (“Chucky”), dummies (“Magic”), houses (“Amityville Horror”) and cars (“Christine”) leads quickly to even deeper levels of WTF, to otherwise innocuous-cum-iniquitous entities like tomatoes (“Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”), beds (“Deathbed: The Bed that Eats”), and even—God help us—killer laundry presses (“The Mangler”). 

Why should we, as discerning cultural consumers, be the least bit surprised by the idea of a homicidally telekinetic tire rolling along on a bloodthirsty killing rampage? French techno musician/filmmaker Quentin Dupieux (who’s only real prior claim to fame was that similarly inexplicable Levi’s ad with the little yellow head-bopping puppet), tells us, literally, directly, and right into the camera: there is no reason. That simple. Movies are not real and are in no way subject to any kind of logic that we might expect from, say, reality.

The surprise, then, is that Dupieux’s movie, in which a sentient tire rolls a dusty highway of destruction exploding bugs, birds, and yes, inevitably people with the power of its evil vulcanized mind, succeeds completely in employing the most ridiculous possible premise to point explicitly at the ridiculousness we’ve come to accept in the stories we blithely consent to pay good money for. A devious look at an industry collapsing under its addiction to recycled ideas and a culture that starves itself with excess, “Rubber” is almost pure metaphor, breaking down the fourth wall like Schrödinger’s cat leaping out of its box to claw at the eyes of the unsuspecting observer. 

Introducing positively Brechtian elements on screen that actually announce their own artifice as representations of the filmmaking process, the film immediately transcends its B-movie hooks to become a three-dimensional Venn diagram of the colliding relationships between the audience (which is shown standing in a desert studying the tire’s exploits from a distance with binoculars, squabbling amongst themselves over story details), the producers (the character of “the Accountant” first picks their pockets, and then serves them a huge poisoned turkey), and the directors (here played by “the Cop,” an authority figure who is all too aware that the whole endeavor is a sham, but bristles when anyone behaves as if it is not). The effect is dizzying. Some movies wink at you; few actively poke you in the eye.

Another surprise, and a big one, is the clarity, even delicacy, with which Dupieux portrays his rubbery subject. He wraps his metaphor in scenes of almost shocking sensitivity, often placing his camera at hub-height among other subtle tricks, to create an honest sympathy between the viewer and the viewed. 

As our dreaded treaded antihero (named, awesomely enough, Robert) unaccountably wakes up, drags himself out of the sand and pulls himself upright to take his first wobbly rolls all alone under the desert sky, there’s both an acute cuteness to it as well as a disquieting sense of the anger one might feel at the realization of being just another hunk of discarded garbage. 

There’s a point at which Robert silently watches a woman swimming in a roadside motel pool, and the force of his longing for normalcy is right up there with John Merrick’s from David Lynch’s “Elephant Man” when he decides to lay his enormous misshapen head to sleep on a regular pillow. It feels, against all common sense, perfectly sensible that this tire would be attracted to fellow travelers along the road, and rightfully furious when they refuse to acknowledge his importance as a thing that exists, lives and breaths, and might just blow their minds—both analogously and practically—if given half a chance. 

The only real drawback to “Rubber” may be inherent to the form. Dupieux never quite transcends his art house conceit to achieve the thrills, horrors or laughs one might hope for in such madness. However, simultaneously profoundly odd and oddly profound, it’s definitely a cut above most of the other tired retreads in wide release.