Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stalker’ on Hulu, a By-the-Numbers Thriller About a Nice Guy and the Nut That’s Ruining His Life

Now on Hulu, Stalker was once known as Blinders but the title was changed to make the film much easier to confuse with a whole bunch of other movies, including, but not limited to, Tarkovsky’s classic Stalker. Not that one might too easily mix up this low-budget thriller with brainfry sci-fi; Tyler Savage’s film is a modest cautionary tale of sorts set in the wifi era. Now let’s see if he has anything new to say within the well-worn subgenre.

STALKER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Andy (Vincent Van Horn) is moving. Sold his drums, threw a few things in his car, drove to Los Angeles. He knows nobody there. He was a teacher back in Austin, and he has nothing lined up save for a lead or two on tutoring gigs. His mother calls and she’s needling him about his job situation, and Andy thumbs through some photos and videos of him and his ex like something inside him still stings. He must be GTFOing. But more importantly, he has a dog, and he named it Juicebox, which just seems rude. He calls him “Juice,” which is slightly better, but it’s too fraught with OJ Simpson implications for its own good. Anyway, our heart goes out to Juicebox, who’s such a good boy, a very good boy, for suffering through life with such a trite and whimsical name. I mean, every time that poor pooch shows his driver’s license, it surely starts a conversation he’d rather not have.

Anyway, Andy, who seems like a perfectly decent and reasonable guy in every way except in dog-naming, sits at a bar by himself and strikes up a convo with Sam (Christine Ko). They hit it off. She says hey let’s get out of here and they get out of there, and get a lift from a Ryde cab back to her place. The driver senses that Andy might be nudge-wink-eyebrow-lift that night and kindly offers him a breath mint. He accepts. Nice guy! Andy and Sam have a nice not-damp night together where they connect more psychologically than physically. Aww.

The next day, Andy’s at the coffeeshop with Juicebox when who does he run into but Driver with Breath Mints. His name is Roger (Michael Lee Joplin). They chat and Roger says they should hang out and Andy says yeah sure in a tone that tells us he’s being nice but surely isn’t going to follow through on the hanging out. Then Roger asks for his number and Andy gives it to him because to not do so would be rude. Hey, Andy, repeat after me: “Sorry, I’m not comfortable doing that.” It’s called setting boundaries. Try it sometime! They part and a moment or two passes and we see Roger in his car wearing an expression one might classify as moderately unhinged. Then the ominous music starts, and Andy doesn’t hear it but we sure do, telling us that Roger is trouble. They end up having beers but after that Roger gets a little too texty and Andy ghosts him and blows him off to hang with Sam and the next thing you know Roger is ruining his life. That’s what you get for being not-rude, Andy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I dunno — The Crush, The Roommate, Swimfan, Fatal Attraction, etc., with one fairly direct reference to The Cable Guy.

Performance Worth Watching: Van Horn and Ko make us believe their characters are tangible humans, albeit with the context of a plot that tends to strain credibility.

Memorable Dialogue: Andy: “There’s something a little off about him, but,” Andy says, trailing off. But what, Andy, but what? But YOU’RE IN A MOVIE CALLED STALKER, that’s what.

Sex and Skin: None. (It appears Juicebox is the only one who gets to watch Andy and Sam have sex.)

Our Take: Stalker features a classic Frustration Plot that gaslights us into thinking there’s nothing that can be done in this situation. Andy’s damned if he dos and damned if he don’ts and one can’t help but wonder if Roger created this maddening scenario as Andy’s punishment for naming his dog Juicebox (and, to extrapolate further, perhaps murder him before he gets a second dog and names it Fannypack). He may be justified in doing so, but the truth is more mundane, because I think Roger is just flat-out nuts.

Anyway, this plot leads us incrementally to the valley of the shadow of the failure to suspend disbelief: an uh-huh moment, followed by an UH-HUH moment, then a straight-up NAH moment that strains plausibility in a transparent quest for a variation on age-old stalker-movie tropes. These developments go against the halfway decent character work that Ko and Van Horn cultivate, although their work is rendered moot when they eventually become puppets of the plot. And Joplin tends to lean on crazy-guy eye-bulging affectations, since the screenplay doesn’t even bother to grant Roger an iota of depth.

This isn’t to say Stalker is a bad movie, just an unremarkable one. The writing and direction are concise, and Savage makes the most of what surely was a tight budget. But it doesn’t show us anything we haven’t seen before; even the big reveal, via a wacky twist ending, feels pat in its presentation. The movie stirs up a little paranoia about how modern technology renders us vulnerable to resourceful wackjobs — or at least resourceful wackjobs who are given a leg up by screenwriter gods who wrote the ending first and then mapped out the rest of the plot — and might have something to say about passive-aggressive texting, or non-texting, as the case may be. If you dare ghost, ghost with caution, I guess.

Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s not much meat on Stalker’s bones. I shrug in its general direction.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Stalker (2021) on Hulu