Unsettling 'Stuck' cuts close to the bone of human behavior
What really scares the director who made the cult horror classic "Re-Animator"? If Stuart Gordon's nasty and corrosive new horror-thriller "Stuck" is any indication, it's not reanimated brain-eating corpses or other fantastical terrors. It's man's casual indifference to his fellow man.
"Stuck" does what any good B movie should, working its way under your skin with a mix of gory jolts and outrageous humor, while cutting uncomfortably close to the bone in its look at how people really behave under pressure. What happens in "Stuck" is extreme, to be sure, but what's unsettling is how extremely believable Gordon makes it seem.
Based on a notorious 2002 crime, "Stuck" follows two working-class characters heading for a collision. Brandi (Mena Suvari) is an orderly at a nursing home, putting up with indignities from both her elderly charges and her callous bosses in order to get a promotion. Tom (Stephen Rea) is a laid-off white collar worker who has rapidly descended into homelessness, and can't seem to catch a break.
One fateful night, Brandi is driving home, high on Ecstasy, when she hits Tom with her car with such force that the poor man gets lodged in her windshield. Panicked, and fearful that a DUI will cost her her job, she drives home, parks the car in her garage (with a bleeding Tom hanging halfway outside it), and tries to put the whole thing out of her mind.
What ensues is a gripping, sometimes excruciating battle for survival. A wounded Tom tries to free himself from the car, while an increasingly desperate Brandi comes to believe that she can't let Tom live. What's insidious about "Stuck" is that while Tom is the obvious victim, Gordon and screenplay writer John Strysik don't make Brandi evil so much as recognizably weak and selfish.
Suvari ("American Beauty") gives a fierce, funny performance as Brandi, a study in contradictions who can believably whack Tom with a 2-by-4 and then ask "Are you all right?" Rea ("The Crying Game") seems a little wasted, given that Tom gets little to do beyond moan and wriggle for much of the movie. But Rea's hangdog face and quiet voice make him instantly sympathetic for the audience, particularly as the battle of wits between Tom and Brandi escalates in an exciting, bloody finale. In very different ways, both characters are trying to take charge of their lives.
"Stuck" shouldn't be confused with a great movie, but it sets modest goals for itself and completely fulfills them. When Gordon was a UW-Madison student in the 1960s, he shocked the city with a production of "Peter Pan" that featured nude dancers and an acid trip. Forty years later, he still knows how to hit a nerve.
Mena Suvari stars in 'Stuck.'
