STUCK

Nurse Brandi is returning home after a night of partying at a nightclub. Fogged by alcohol and drugs, the girl hits Thomas, a poor homeless and unemployed man. The man smashes the windshield of Brandi's car and gets stuck there; she, taken by panic, does not stop and heads home, parking the car in the garage as if nothing happened. For Thomas, injured and immobilized, it will be a fight for survival. Stuart Gordon is an underrated director and, when he's lucky, forgotten... wrongly, since he has an enviable career rich in original and successful films, starting with that splatter masterpiece that is "Re-Animator". Gordon has followed a particular path that led him to start as a guru of extreme gore together with his friend and colleague Brian Yuzna (always remaining ten lengths ahead of him, however) and continuing through science fiction ("Robojox"; "2013: La fortezza" and "Space Truckers") and gothic ("Dolls"; "Il pozzo e il pendolo"; "Castle Freak") to then dedicate himself, "Dagon" parenthesis aside, to a more intimate and minimal type of cinema that from "King of the Ants" continued with "Edmond" and this "Stuck". A caption at the beginning of the film informs us that "Stuck" is based on a true story and this seems paradoxical as we continue watching, because "Stuck" tells a story so grotesque and absurd that it seems to have come out of a "Tales from the Crypt" comic. But it is known that reality is often more incredible than fiction and therefore, however difficult to believe, what happens in "Stuck" is not so unlikely as it might seem. Gordon, who is also the author of the subject, initially tells us in parallel two distant lives that do not seem to have anything in common. Brandi is a kind and patient nurse, Thomas a poor wretch without a job who gets evicted and is continuously humiliated by life, forced to live as a homeless person. The lives of the two will meet due to a fatal accident that is also the trigger for the change in the characters. Brandi, taken by panic but also altered by alcohol and drugs, completely changes, transforming into an irresponsible person completely dissociated from reality. Thomas, initially gloomy and calm as usual, is forced to pull out all the stops to survive the absurd imprisonment to which he is condemned. At one point "Stuck" becomes a delightful theater of the absurd in which only the character played by Russell Hornsby, Brandi's boyfriend, stands out, described with all possible clichés of the American rapper-gangsta. Gordon also has fun throwing in splatter and various atrocities, caused by the terrible effects of the accident on Thomas's body, pierced and disfigured by the car debris and the impact with it. The good performance of the actors greatly influences the success of the film, Mena Suvari ("American Beauty"; "American Pie") in "afro braids" version brings to life a character as strange as the film and Stephen Rea ("Underworld - Il risveglio") is a perfect average man without qualities, a metaphor for the cruelty of fate. Presented at Cannes in 2007, "Stuck" arrived in Italy directly on home video only at the end of 2011 thanks to Delta Pictures. For the series "better late than never".