Review of Stay (2005) by Willis M — 21 May 2009

I knew Stay was directed by Marc Forster, the man who made Monster's Ball and Quantum of Solace. However, it wouldn't have surprised me to see David Lynch's name somewhere associated witjh this film. Stay is the kind of dreamy, hallucinatory surreal motion picture that takes pleasure in screwing with its viewers' minds. The film is less obscure than any of Lynch's recent movies, since all is (sort of) explained at the end. However, the $64,000 question is whether or not the understanding of what has happen satisfies. There are enough clues present for audience members to figure out the secret, but I couldn't help feeling completely ripped-off when the truth was unveiled.

Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) is a psychiatrist, one of his patients is Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a trooubled college student who announces that he intends to kill himself on the coming Saturday night, at midnight. Sam taking it serious tries to get invovled. Sam's life soon becomes entangled in Henry's. The deeper Sam goes into Henry's world, the more fractured the lines between reality and illusion become, until Sam starts to have doubts of his own sanity.

Forster uses this film to showcase his stylistic choices. He engages the audience with a series of daring scene-to-scene transitions. Such as, for example a man walking through a door becomes another getting off a train. Or a face morphng into another. He also multplies certain sequences two, three, or four times. These are used as a visual strategy for the film to undermind our confident that anything is really happening the way that it seems to be.

Stay works well on a technical level, also the narrative holds strong in retrospect. Stay is an interesting movie, but it's hard to recommend for anyone other than the As it will test the patience of audiences expecting something easy to comprehend and self-explanatory. With the very confusing storyline that's not all that unique, dosen't help to make it any easier to say go see this movie. But on a side note this film has some of the best visual trickery I've seen. So, I think it's worth watching on that note alone.