[HorrorScience] Rubber (2010)

«In Steven Spielberg's film «E.T.», why is the alien brown? For no reason."

That phrase is the one that opens this film, and it is the one that best represents what you should expect from it if you plan to watch it in its entirety.

Rubber It is a French film of the "horror comedy" genre, which I personally consider to be an intelligent essay in terms of script writing in conjunction with the visual section.

Paraphrasing once again the actor who is in charge of speaking to us in the first minutes of the film looking directly at the camera, «All great films, without exception, contain an important element of "no reason."«. And this is the premise with which the writer and director of this film intends to justify what we saw minutes before this opening speech and what we will see throughout the remaining 79 minutes. Because let's not forget the most important thing: Rubber stars a tire. And for no reason.

Rubber is about the story of Robert, an abandoned tire in the California desert, who suddenly and inexplicably comes to life. With difficulty he manages to get "on his feet" and roll across the arid landscape, learning to do it with more and more speed and strength, and later discovering that possesses psychokinetic powers that allow you to destroy anything at will and without having to move.

At first Robert is content with crushing objects lying around the desert or small living creatures, like a plastic bottle or a scorpion. It then decides to attack larger living creatures, such as a crow or a rabbit. And finally discovers that can kill humans, making their heads explode.

Once he learns how to murder people, he sets out in search of more humans to kill, and on his way he meets a somewhat mysterious woman with whom he becomes obsessed.

What is this woman doing traveling in the desert? Who is it? Why is Robert attracted to her? Is it because it's good? Can a tire be attracted to a woman?

Honestly, all those questions don't matter, because the film doesn't seek answers to any of that, nor does it give reasons for what is happening. Each person can invent their own reasons, or connect the dots following a certain logic and believe that they have found meaning in everything that happens.

The fact that all the action is being seen through binoculars by a group of people isolated in the desert, and that at one point the film makes us doubt whether what this group of people is seeing is something fictional or real, can confuse us, making us follow a double plot. But really these people who are watching all the action from afar represents ourselves as viewers of this film, and they simply have no greater importance than being there, as simple spectators, watching how the action develops and how the situation of the people who observe without intervening worsens.

From the latter, some philosophical interpretations can be extracted that the director may have also thought about and that is why he included these spectators in the film, but I think it is more likely that he simply put them there as one more element of this whole set of "without reasons" that make up Rubber.

The music and the general aesthetic of this film stand out in their union, achieving a uniform mix that is difficult to achieve in films of this type and aimed at a class of audiences so determined by genre. Some scenes are visually impeccable., and it shows that everything is very careful.

Some curious facts about Rubber:

• Quentin Dupieux is an electronic musician in France, known as Mr. Oizo.
• The film was presented at the 2010 Cannes and had negative reviews. It then received positive reviews from the media, especially in the United States.
• One of the spectators is played by actor Daniel Quinn, who starred in the film Scanner Cop (1994) in which he played a police officer who had the power to make people's heads explode using his mind, just like the tire Robert does in this film.