Stay Out – review

Director: Jeff Carroll

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

This is a low budget film that, in its just under 70-minute running time, does plenty wrong and yet has something that might have been built upon. It involves the Polonia Brothers – as a production company and one of them is involved within the filmmaking also. They are known, of course, for their zero budget films and I can say, at least, that this is better than their dreadful How to Slay a Vampire.

opening fangs

Before I go into the film proper, I have to point out that this seems to want to riff on Jordan Peele’s marvellous Get Out – the titles are similar, the poster art is reminiscent of the earlier film and there is a race aspect, along with a look at interracial relationships. This film opens with some (I assume stock) footage of Miami and that then moves into some more nightmarish imagery that includes fangs. If the rest of the film had carried the tone of the opening, then this would have been a better effort.

Caitlin and Tyshawn

After the credits we are in a car driven by Tyshawn (Fransley Hyppolite) – a note on the actors, I hope I have attributed them to their roles correctly, neither the IMDb page nor the closing credits connect them to character and I had to google and hope to find corresponding pictures to identify most of them. In the front is his girlfriend Caitlin (Celine Alva) and Paul (Dante' DiGiacomo) is in the back with girlfriend Nikayla (Bianca Glemaud). They are off to spend Spring Break in Miami. To the viewer it becomes quickly obvious that the opening Miami shots were indeed stock footage… but stock footage with a much crisper and superior standard of photography.

Paul and Nikayla

They lose GPS and start to discuss racism – assuming the area they are in is white supremacist. Here I had one of the biggest problems with the film. Not the messaging around racism but the dialogue, firstly for being badly written – and delivered, though to be fair it might have been the quality that impacted that, given it didn’t feel natural at all. Secondly this was incredibly on the nose – Get Out could conceivably be accused of being on the nose also but it was first and foremost a brilliant deconstruction, fantastically acted, inventive and incredibly well written. This, however, just throws the concepts it wishes to discuss at you without nuance – the message is good, the conveyance of the message clumsy.

Jenna

I need to mention that the scenes in car seemed odd because there was no view through the windows. Be that as it may, they get a flat tire. They fix it (no sign of a jack in any scene with a wheel, by the way) and then they get another flat. There’s no cell service and so they walk to a motel (that looks more like a community hall with bar). In the hall are the two oddly acting custodians Jenna and Bradley (who Tyshawn describes as being robot people) and, having been told there will be no rescue until the next day, they get the beers out and aim to make the best of it. 

The gang

One by one they vanish and the first to go is Paul, who looks for a toilet and doesn’t come back. Nikayla goes looking for him and we get a convoluted journey through locations that would appear to be unconnected with the building the primary location is in and utterly failing to correspond with the outer establishing shot. Along corridors she goes, then in a lift (up, I’d hazard) and then immediately down stairs, outside amongst abandoned looking vehicles and then through corridors again. It feels wrong. Anyway, she finds him unconscious, tied and being bled into blood bags…

female vampire

As for the vampires… At the end of the film we get a highly suspiciously delivered exposition (one of the friends wakes and the male vampire decides to tell her everything for no good reason) that reveals they are Nosferatians from a planet with a black sun – so they cannot go out in our sun. They find blood vastly improved due to human sun exposure, however. They have also worked out how to posses bodies, to allow them to walk in sunlight (another Get Out parallel with a mind taking over a body). They seem to have also created zombies that appear at the finale.

everyone caught by the vampire

So, too on the nose with its messaging, a rather blunt instrument, and really poor use of locations that seemed to be mashed together without a care as to whether it felt right. There are day for night shots that feel more like day and confuse the timeframe the film purports to be in. The dialogue feels unnatural (for Bradley and Jenna this is purposeful but it is the dialogue for the protagonists that really lets this down). Yet, despite it all it didn’t outstay its welcome and I wanted to like it. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK