D/S: Quentin Dupieux. P:Gregory Bernard, Julien Berlan, Kevos Van Der Meiren. Cast: Stephen Spinella, Roxane Mesquida, Jack Plotnick, Haley Ramm, Wings Hauser, Ethan Cohn. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Optimum Home Entertainment.

A mixture of film-school silliness and authentic genre-bending strangeness, Rubber is a bizarre satire (shot in English by a French crew) on movies, metaphysics and telekinetic tyres. The film’s self-consciously quirky opening invites the weary suspicion that director Quentin Dupieux has watched one too many Hal Hartley films; but as the film goes on, and developments become more surreally self-referential, the viewer finds himself happily settling back to enjoy one of the most peculiarly entertaining and original horror comedies of recent memory.

A dusty police cruiser weaves its way across the desert, pulling up in front of the camera. The boot opens and out steps the local police chief (Stephen Spinella). He proceeds to deliver an absurdist monologue (“No Reason”), evidently a manifesto for the film itself. His audience is a small group of people, gathered there for some kind of performance. A shabby man with a bicycle hands out binoculars and points off into the distance: there, somewhere in the desert, our film is about to begin.

Cut to a nondescript patch of scrubland. A tyre, half-buried in the dust, begins to twitch and move. Gradually it frees itself and, with increasing confidence, begins to roll across the plain, possessed of some nebulous purpose – and a personality. Here and there it meets an obstacle: a plastic bottle proves no barrier, though one made of glass is less easily traversed. From here it moves on to living creatures: a crow, a rabbit. The tyre (identified as “Robert” in the end titles) contemplates them for a few moments; then, alarmingly, it begins to vibrate. A high-pitched whine rises to a crescendo. The animals explode. Robert, it would appear, is a living tyre with telekinetic powers. And now he’s on a roll, aiming for the nearest town with destruction on his mind.

Periodically, the film cuts back to the audience watching from a distance. They make derogatory comments about the progress of the action, or lack thereof. A gratuitous shower scene makes them perk up: the tyre leers through a half-open door to watch the shapely female lead disrobe. The man with a bicycle shows up again, to bring the audience food. All who eat it die agonisingly of food poisoning – all except a man in a wheelchair (Wings Hauser), who refused the meal. Surrounded by corpses, he continues to watch through his binoculars; and everyone in his field of view is obliged to continue with this tale of a killer tyre, whose rampage becomes ever more ridiculous. Heads are soon exploding all over town. In between attacks Robert relaxes in his motel room, watching step aerobics. The police chief makes a couple of attempts to convince his deputies that their reality is false, merely part of an entertainment. He asks one of them to shoot him, to prove it. The bullets splatter blood around, but leave him unharmed. The deputies are bemused. Yet while the man in the wheelchair continues to observe them, the police have little choice but to adhere to genre conventions: they must track the tyre down and destroy it. But how?

Rubber’s mannered eccentricity isn’t for everyone; it’s not really much more than a series of visual non sequiturs, dressed up with metafictional flummery. Its ontological subtext – that reality is a function of observation, forcing its characters to carry out their roles so long as they are watched by at least one viewer – is disappointingly underdeveloped, finally emerging as more trite than intriguing. But Robert the tyre is a unique anti-hero, the situations are funny more often than not, and the film as a whole has a goofy charm that’s hard to resist. And the end title sequence is a joy: to a pounding piece of retro-electronica by Gaspard Auge and Mr.Oizo, seemingly a tribute to the entire back catalogue of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, we watch a possessed child’s tricycle rolling along endless roads and highways, heading with grim purpose for its unsuspecting target: Hollywood itself…