It’s a little bit Danny Boyle, a little bit Guy Ritchie and a lot more harrowing than anyone tuning into a show called Stags that stars Charlie Cooper from bittersweet comedy This Country would have a right to expect. Daniel Cullen’s six-part drama takes a group of pals, sends them on a debauched week away in an unnamed South American country to celebrate the imminent nuptials of one of their number, then slams them into a godforsaken island prison run by two warring siblings and lets them scramble for survival.
Stu (Nico Mirallegro) is the stag and Ryan (Corin Silva) and Ant (Cooper) are his best mates. They are the kind of friends who come and help you find the £5,000 engagement ring you buried on a shingle beach as part of your proposal setup without really thinking the logistics through. Whether they will also be the kind of friends who can stop you getting tortured in prison is one of the questions – perhaps the most pressing – on which Stags furiously turns.
The rest of the stag do gang comprises Stu’s university friends Hugo (Paul Forman) and Clem (Sophie Lenglinger), his fiancee’s father, John, and brother Kai (Cavan Clerkin and Jojo Macari) and Greg (Asim Chaudhry), whose connection to Stu is not quite clear. It is Kai who buys the drugs for the week-long party, Ryan who gets the remains of it through airport security when it’s time to go home and Greg who collapses because one of the balloons full of coke he has swallowed bursts in his stomach while they wait. That’s very much the thing that gets them thrown in prison.
From there it’s a descent into chaos – expertly controlled by Cullen for us, but oh God, those poor idiot boys (and John). Clem disappears before they arrive, her fate unknown, although the lads note that there are women in the prison. John and Kai – by virtue of Kai being the only one who speaks any Spanish – set out to find the prison governor and make him get in touch with the British embassy. The governor meets with them via video call and assures them that the embassy will leap into action to free a bunch of British idiots who got caught smuggling drugs. When a message arrives from the consulate saying they are aware of the case and that they are likely to spend five or six years on remand, their abandonment feels complete.
An unwilling Hugo is left to look after Greg, now also wounded by a gunshot that I honestly missed in all the commotion of their collective arrest. Stu, Ant and a reluctant Ryan wend their way through the expansive jail, which incorporates a classroom full of children, while looking for a doctor. They eventually find one but it goes even less well than you might hope – although Cullen has so expertly ratcheted up the tension and dread by this point that it is almost a relief when the first bit of gore arrives.
As first blood is drawn, Hugo and Greg are approached by two groups of children with Google Translate on their phones. They are emissaries from the brother and sister running the joint, who want to know how much money they would like to be loaned, at an impossible rate of interest, to secure medical services for Greg and from whom. Greg picks sister Selma (Paulina Gálvez). They are invited to dine in her beautiful garden, which is where they learn that he told her his family own Greggs and she learns that, in fact, it does not, which puts his friends on the hook for his $200,000 medical bill.
One final twist later and we’re done with the opening episode (the only one available for review). It’s an exhilarating ride, gorgeously shot, beautifully played by all and seeded with multiple conflicts – of class, of temperament, between loyalties and between collective and individual responsibility – and grounded in a premise that is not too far-fetched to prevent the stakes from feeling genuine and high. You care about these fools – at least more than the British embassy does.
• Stags is on Paramount+ now.
