Cat and Louse

Stuck Directed by Stuart Gordon

No one has your back. That’s the grim message in Stuck, starring Mena Suvari as Brandi, a party-girl nurse in an old folks’ home who wears her hair in cornrows, takes ecstasy the night before an early shift and shamelessly sucks up to her boss in an effort to land a promotion. But her chance at all of those added responsibilities looks less likely after she hits the newly homeless Tom (Stephen Rea) late one night on her way home from the clubs. Unfortunately for them both, he rather rudely gets stuck in her windshield and stays alive. Faced with the terrifying prospect of going to jail for something she resolutely believes was his fault, Brandi parks him in her garage and goes inside to screw her boyfriend. After all, if being hit by a car didn’t kill him, maybe being left bleeding in a pane of glass will do the trick. But the survival instinct is too strong—even for a loser like Tom—and what follows is an increasingly frantic game of cat and mouse between the two, as both become desperate to escape from one another. Oh, and it’s (mostly) based on a true story.

Despite the large amount of blood and windshield wiper–pierced flesh, Stuck also manages to be blackly funny. In addition to facing a man in her garage, Brandi must also deal with an icy boss, a flaky best friend who can’t adequately cover Brandi’s ass at work and a supposedly gangsta boyfriend who isn’t quite as tough as he claims—especially faced with a man in a windshield. He’s also cheating on Brandi, and unfortunately for the naked girl in his bed, Brandi discovers them on the worst day of her life. And the impatient fury that Suvari infuses that scene with is both funny and a welcome catharsis for audiences weary of watching violence escalate but never explode.

But while Brandi juggles the pieces of her life falling down around her, poor Tom is turned into a human Whack-a-Mole, as his efforts to escape are all thwarted. Even Brandi’s cell phone turns out to be of no use, since he has no idea where he is. And the nice neighborhood boy and his mother can’t do anything to save him, since they’re in the states illegally. Everyone’s looking out for themselves, no matter what the cost to other people.

That Stuck is mostly based an actual event (one that happened in Texas, of course) is frightening, but ultimately irrelevant thanks to Suvari’s and Rea’s nuanced performances. Suvari makes Brandi so fascinating that you find yourself oscillating between love and hate for her so quickly, you fear whiplash. She’s great with her patients! She drinks and takes drugs and then drives? Her whole future could be ruined because of one mistake! She’ll let a man bleed to death in her garage? By the time the film ends, Suvari has slowly and methodically stripped every layer of likeability away, leaving just a hollow-eyed shell of a person willing to stop at nothing to escape the nightmarish future she glimpses. Tom, on the other hand, becomes more likeable the longer we watch him writhe. First appearing as the sort of man who can’t afford the rent on a seedy apartment—and scurrying into an unemployment office with an enormous chip on his shoulder—any sympathy we might feel for someone else in his position is dead on arrival. But as he begins to realize that escaping is up to him, Tom shows surprising ingenuity and dexterity. And while the film’s end may differ from reality, the events directly leading to it are jaw-dropping in their stupid cruelty. Some people will stop at nothing to protect themselves, and the only path to survival necessitates fighting back.