Pit Stop screens in the Online Short Block #4 for Panic Fest, 30 March 2025
The car has stopped, on a backroad in the middle of nowhere. Inside, captive Quinn (Emily Sweet) tries to reach for a paperclip on the floor to pick the lock of her handcuffs, while outside, her unnamed, armed driver (Mary Rose Branick) radios in that the vehicle, forced to take a detour, has run out of gas. Now immobilised together, these two must play a waiting game. Quinn wants to talk, while the guard, who barely regards her prisoner as human, does not want to listen – and as time passes, and tensions mount, something else, something genuinely not human, circles outside, threatening them both. Yet either woman is perfectly capable of helping the other, if only they could overcome their mutual fear and form a connection of trust.
Like a feminised reimagining of Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), writer/director David A. Flores’ short film Pit Stop traps two violently opposed people together, and allows them to discover the ties that bind in an unjust world. “We can’t pretend the rift didn’t happen,” Quinn says at one point, “We live it every day.” By ‘rift’, Quinn means a cosmic rupture that has brought predatory monsters to Earth – but that genre element, though here manifested as a barely seen, stress-eating creature which attacks the car at the precise moment its human occupants are locked in a life-or-death struggle with each other, is also a metaphor, figuring the socioeconomic divide that unnecessarily pits people like Quinn and people like her guard against one another. The guard lives in a walled police state of haves, while have-not Quinn is part of a downtrodden, exiled underclass – robbers and rebels doing what they can to survive in a monstrous system stacked against them. It is not hard to see in all this an allegory of a polarised America running on empty, where many problems might be better resolved through a little cooperation, sympathy and listening.
Pit Stop is a single-location two-hander, economically containing – within its short duration, and, like Bryan Bertino‘s The Monster (2016), or Sébastien Drouin’s Cold Meat (2023), within the close, cramped quarters of a car’s interior – bigger ideas about the ever-shrinking common ground over which we all seem endlessly to fight. It suggests that when – as an individual or an endangered nation – driving in the wrong direction and refusing even to question the map, it might be good to make a stop and catch the breath. As Quinn puts it, “We don’t have to do this.” In the end, what lies further down the road is left open.
strap: Back seat politics: David A. Flores’ allegorical creature short pits an out-of-gas driver and her prisoner against each other and the monstrousness circling in
© Anton Bitel
