An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.

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.

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.

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.

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.