"Stuck," a film by UW alum Stuart Gordon, makes an encore performance at Sundance Theatre starting Friday. The film premiered in Wisconsin at the 2008 Wisconsin Film Festival. Below is dane101's review of the film.

Director Stuart Gordon snuck into the back row of the theater for the last 15 minutes of his movie Stuck. That he missed the rest of the movie would be a shame if he hasn't seen it with an audience as engaged as the one that packed the Orpheum Main Stage last night -- their synchronized gasps and groans would have been be catnip for a old-school provocateur like Gordon. He made his reputation on horror movies like Re-Animator and King of the Ants, but he's also got hardy theater chops -- his last movie starred William H. Macy and was based on a David Mamet play -- and it's this double-barreled approach that makes him a natural for a bloody melodrama like Stuck. In its first half, when it's particularly well observed about its lower class, sad sack characters, the movie is especially terrific, and it deflates a little when those characterizations thin out near the end. Nevertheless, for ripped-from-the-headlines fare, it's delicious.

Stuck takes its inspiration (and many of its plot details) from a gruesome 2001 hit-and-run-with-a-twist case. The movie follows two people stuck in dead ends -- jobless and recently evicted Tom (Stephen Rea of The Crying Game and V for Vendetta) and promotion-desperate retirement-home nurse Brandi (Mena Suvari of American Beauty and American Pie) -- that meet at a fateful intersection when Brandi, rolling on ecstasy en route to a booty call, strikes Tom, lodging him in her windshield. Panicked, she drives home and parks the car in her garage, planning to wait out his certain death rather than fess up and get him help, but Tom has other plans.

Demonizing Brandi is an easy thing to do, but the first act stacks things in both characters' favor by sketching their workaday lives of quiet desperation -- Tom's fundamental decency in the wake of downsizing and joblessness, Brandi's hope to make a slightly better life for herself as a single woman. When she first hits Tom and doesn't immediately help him, her stated concern aren't the legal consequences in and of themselves, but that they would jeopardize her promotion. It seems an appropriately tunnel-minded recourse for her pharma-altered state, and watching her play out the rest of the movie trying to keep him secret while still being the model employee would have provided some lunatic moments that show how far 'round the bend she's been driven. Instead, she spends the rest of the movie in a bit of a stupor, even arriving at work an hour late the day she's supposed to get her promotion, and that breakdown of motive -- making it less about her trying to keep up professional appearances and instead just making it about saving her own skin -- turns the character from demented for recognizable reasons to just plain loathsome, which is a less interesting route for a movie to go that had previously shown us its characters' precarious lives with such sympathy.

And so as the movie unfolds, it becomes a mini-Die Hard-in-a-garage, with Tom -- having painfully extricated himself from the windshield -- trying to haul his broken body out to the outside world and Brandi as the Hans Gruber in his way. The thriller beats are nicely paced and plenty of fun, allowing Gordon to deploy the shock-and-eww tactics for which he is renowned, and Rea and Suvari are terrific. Stuck is a juicy piece of termite art; king of the ants, indeed.