Seeking human connection, the balding, bullied Neal finds it in the hands of Perla, a sex worker. She plies her trade at the kind of massage parlor one speaks of with air quotes.
It’s also the kind of place that attracts gang robberies. During just that, Neal, dressed only in his tighty-whities, shifts into White Knight mode, rescuing Perla not just from the scene of the crime, but her dead-end career tugging at strangers’ junk. Circumstances force them to flee town with their lives and little else.
As the unlikely couple of Rub’s sympathetic but tragic heart, unknowns Micah Spayer and Jennifer Figuereo are terrific. Neither embody the movies’ idea of conventional leads, which is honestly half the film’s appeal. Pretty Woman, this ain’t.
While Spayer has the showier role as an incel with an uncontrollable temper, Figuereo’s is, I’d argue, the more difficult to pull off: making us believe she has feelings for Neal that go beyond convenience. I wish the supporting cast members operated at their skill level. Neal’s ruthless co-workers act like they’re in a comedy, and poorly.
Rub isn’t a joke, although the tagline of “Not all endings are happy” sure has a winking tastelessness not present in Christopher Fox’s first feature. Its initial half works well, but once Neal and Perla hit the road with no place to go, the movie doesn’t seem to have a destination locked down either. A dinner scene among a table of wayward souls breaking bread in particular grates with fabricated emotion; Rub does its best trafficking in the dark, like employing psychedelic animation to convey the drug-induced panic on Neal’s face. —Rod Lott
After livestreamer Logan (Tyler Gene) goes missing while looking for a “haunted, mythological creature thing” at North Carolina’s Lake Tomahawk, a group of friends and fellow content creators search for him.
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