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Adam is a high school teacher who's looking to score a stash of pot for a Friday night of recreation with his friends, Will and Ally. Since he teaches high schoolers, he decides that the best course of action is to get one of them to bring the drugs to his house. Everything goes well until Liz, the high schooler he picks to act as his drug mule, decides to try and blackmail him by taking pictures of him holding the drugs, with her camera phone.
The rest of this short film deals with how Adam deals with Liz and how his friends respond to this behavior.
While the overall writing for this film wasn't too bad, its acting had issues. It was difficult to believe in the characters as their performances seemed to be somewhere between improv and scripted, which in turn left their timing lacking, as well as their ability to convince the viewer of their realit. (Considering the entire short was shot in just three hours, it's likely that the actors didn't actually know the script all that well.)
Warning! Spoilers Ahead!
Unfortunately, the ending to the film was rather anti-climactic, since there could only be a degree of suspense if the viewer could believe that Adam could become dangerous and violent. If one believed that, then one could believe he might pull out a gun and shoot Liz for her camera phone. However, because of the other acting issues and the rather waffling character of Adam, it was simply too difficult to believe that he could become dangerous or menacing. With that said, the filmmaker did throw in a bit of a curve ball to make you think that Adam might be somewhat disturbed toward the end and that he might rape Liz in revenge for her attempted betrayal. They decided not to follow that course of action (which was probably for the best, although it would have been unexpected), and the end felt drab and without much of a profound message that the viewer could take home with them. (Because of their length, short films tend to rely on some sort of overarching message that the viewer can take away. If the message isn't there, it feels like fluff. In the case of Stash, the only real message I could discern was, “don't have students bring you your drugs,” and, “if you're bringing drugs to your teacher and want to blackmail him, make sure he doesn't see you take the picture!” I'm not sure either of those messages qualifies as profound.)
In addition to the issues with the performances, the visual look of the film was very distracting.
To begin with, the video was either recorded in Canon's Film-Simulation mode or something was done oddly in post to mess with the frame rate, probably to try to recreate the 24 fps frame rate of film. Either way, what ended up occurring was footage that had a strange movement cadence that felt jumpy and disorienting. [Note to the Director: If you want to convert from 29.97 frames per second to 24 frames per second—or, more correctly, 23.976 fps – then I would pick up Magic Bullet Frames, which will run you $199 from Red Giant and works with Premiere Pro and After Effects, which you were using.]
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