‘I’m tired of all these homeless guys sleeping in my windshield!’’ — Mena Suvari stars in Stuck
Stuck opens with slow, drawling shots of elderly inmates in an old folks home, set to jaunty thug rap. It settles on a young nurse, Brandy (Mena Suvari, sporting corn-rows). She’s conscientious and anxious for a promotion. One evening, she heads to the club to meet her boyfriend, takes some ecstasy and hops in her car.
Meanwhile, newly homeless Thomas (Stephen Rea, sporting a tinny, pitiable voice and a face like lumpy clay) shuffles down the street. He has spent the day waiting in line at the employment office. Brandy is dicking around with her cell phone and hits him as he’s crossing the road, pummelling him through the windshield, where he becomes stuck.
She panics and takes off — not to the hospital, but home, where she parks her car in the garage, with Rea lodged in the windshield. Rather than call for help, she waits for her boyfriend to come over, has a drink, sex and falls asleep.
Stuck is based on the story of Chante Jawan Mallard, a Texan woman who, in 2001, hit a homeless man, Gregory Biggs, with her car. He became stuck in her windshield and, rather than call an ambulance, drove home and parked her car — with Biggs still in it — in her garage. During the next couple of days she periodically checked on Biggs while partying and working. It was later revealed that Biggs would have lived if she had called an ambulance.
Stuck takes the premise one step further, with Brandy devolving further into more depraved acts to conceal her crime. She and Thomas enter into an adversarial game with her cruelty set against his Sisyphean struggles to free himself in gory, excruciating detail.
Director Stuart Gordon fills the proceedings with a sense of palpable dread, using his talents as a genre stylist (Re-Animator, From Beyond) to grind the tension, while finding a raw immediacy in Suvari’s anxious vacuity and Rea’s transient wanderings and unending pain. The film is tightly plotted, with particular detail given to sound (the eerie suburban quiet, the stomach-scraping intensity of the accident) and horrifyingly comedic moments, like Brandy trying to mop up Thomas’s blood with a pile of old Kleenex, or her boyfriend mistaking her cries while they’re having sex as ones of orgasmic glee, when she’s actually hallucinating about being fucked by the homeless man in her windshield.
The running gag is that Thomas is continuously offered unreal “choices” — stop sleeping on the park bench or go to jail; face eviction or go to jail. Brandy may have been incredibly naive and dumb, but she did have a choice — cruel self-absorption or saving a man’s life.
