“Anybody can do anything to anyone and get away with it,” a man in Stuart Gordon’s last movie, 2007’s Stuck, says before adding an evergreen kicker: “I mean, look who’s in The White House right now.” The situation this character, Rashid (Russell Hornsby), is applying the cynical reassurance to is a ghastly one in which his girlfriend, Brandi (Mena Suvari), finds herself. The previous night, while driving home under the influence and distracted by her flip phone, she hit a homeless man with her car. The top half of his body explodes through the windshield, zigzags of glass and skin-poking wipers keeping him in place as she hysterically keeps speeding along. Brandi initially swerves toward a hospital but decides against it, too worried about getting caught to attempt an anonymous ambulance-bay dropoff.

In Stuck — which is, depressingly, based on a true story that’s arguably more depressing than the movie — Brandi opts to leave the man, still trapped and barely hanging on for life in her windshield, dying in her home’s garage. She figures she’ll defer bodily disposal, and fixing her car, until later. Working from a screenplay by John Strysik, Gordon manages to make Brandi not entirely unsympathetic. She’s barely making it by as a caregiver at an assisted-living facility, and her exploitative, hard-edged boss (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) is dangling a potentially life-changing promotion in front of her, taking advantage of her eagerness to up her hours. As Brandi sees it, something that could destroy her life would, of course, materialize just as things are starting to turn around. 

That myopic, self-centered line of thinking is also what makes us so ready for her to pay and her victim, Tom (Stephen Rea), to somehow make it out alive and get revenge in the process. She appallingly continues to deflect blame onto Tom, who, though not looking when he was crossing the street, also was not the one speeding while gawking at his phone more intently than the road, alcohol-dulled senses making judgment worse. In a clearer state of mind, with her phone responsibly tucked away, Brandi had plenty of time to see that there was a man ahead of her. 

Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea in Stuck.

Brandi’s just-my-luck complaining feels like nothing compared to Tom’s arc in Stuck. We meet him just as he’s getting evicted from his apartment. The erstwhile project manager got laid off amid some company downsizing; his move to the city to find work proving fruitless, he’s run out of all his unemployment, his bad fortune worsening when he arrives for an interview at an employment office and finds his name lost in the system. (The hiring manager, naturally in this cynical movie, is not hospitable to the idea of cutting Tom any slack; later, when Tom makes a 9-1-1 call after much struggle, the dispatcher hardly seems concerned about the plenty concerning declarations Tom tries to wheeze out.)

Stuck would feel more moralistic if it weren’t so smart, and darkly funny, about the lack of humanity people experiencing homelessness are subjected to and the cutthroat cruelties self-preservation can inspire in people like Brandi. It asks the audience to detest Brandi while also leading viewers to ponder: Would you immediately do the right thing in her shoes, or would you try out self-conservation first? (It’s much easier to look down on her compared to, say, the family of Mexican immigrants next door that almost intervenes while Brandi is away before deciding against it out of deportation concerns.) Brandi’s increasing, anxiety-guided viciousness is persuasively played by co-producer Suvari, who invites even more contempt for the character by making her a cornrowed culture vulture. (The movie has gotten fair criticisms of whitewashing: Suvari’s real-life analog was Black.) Rea is very good in a role that could have otherwise been thankless, requiring not a lot more than pitiful, blood-soaked moaning and groaning. 

Gordon’s final movie before his death in 2020, Stuck is an outlier in his science fiction- and more traditionally horror-leaning body of work. His best movies, like 1985’s Re-Animator and 2001’s Dagon, played like nightmares while also reveling in their Grand Guignol absurdities and the nastiness humanity is capable of. Stuck shares many of its predecessors’ morbid sense of humor and lack of faith in human impulse; different about late-period Gordon is what seems like a second-act breakthrough as a storyteller — the realization that a movie can be plenty horrific without a surfeit of gory special effects and an out-there B-movie premise. The streamlined, satisfying Stuck stacks among his finest works.