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.