Stuck at Chazen Museum Of Art

Bloodied and stuck halfway through a car windshield, Thomas (Stephen Rea) glares at Brandi (Mena Suvari) in the driver’s seat.

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Excerpt from Ian Adcock’s feature on UW Cinematheque’s October Sunday series at the Chazen Museum Of Art: Driving home drunk and high, nursing assistant Brandi Boski (Mena Suvari) hits a homeless man, Thomas Bardo (Stephen Rea). Instead of reporting the accident, Brandi goes home and parks the car in her garage, with Thomas stuck halfway through her windshield. The rest of the film is a slow-motion battle of the wits, as Thomas tries to escape while the increasingly desperate Brandi tries to cover up the crime.

Along with Stuart Gordon’s other late-period films King of the Ants (2003) and Edmond (2005), Stuck (2007) depicts ordinary people’s capacity for evil. While all these are not exactly horror films, at times they manage to be more disturbing than Gordon’s genre work due to their real-life settings and grimy, low-budget feel. Gordon once stated in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine that, “as you get older you start realizing that real life is scarier than anything you can dream up, that the things that people actually do to each other are far more bizarre and horrifying than anything that Lovecraft could dream of.” Though Stuck is openly indebted to Misery (1990), Gordon portrays Brandi not as a monster, but as a sympathetic, albeit self-centered character who is capable of doing monstrous things. Featuring impressive performances from both Suvari and Lea, Stuck is a potent swan song from a master of suspense.