With a homicidal tire as the main character, the film isn't scary enough to qualify as horror and not nearly as amusing as a black comedy should be.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Dupieux's utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time.
To the movie's small credit, there's very little grasping for larger significance: It's a dumb horror film, complete with a sexy female lust object (Kaboom's Mesquida) undraping for a shower scene.
Neither scary, funny, nor anywhere near as clever as it seems to think it is, picture offers audiences few reasons to want to see it beyond its one-joke premise.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
It is, in effect, a movie-house meta mirror, warped and weird, strange but true (except when it isn't). It's whatever you want it to be, which doesn't necessarily make it a great movie (although it contains moments of greatness), but it IS – by virtue of its premise alone – boldly unique.
Boxoffice Magazine by Mark Keizer
Where Rubber veers off the road is that for all its giggly moments and meta-whatever, it's never quite funny enough or scary enough.
While it's admirably perverse for a "killer-tire movie" to be this snooty, it's about half as clever as it thinks it is.
Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek
Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."