|
Advertisement |
Overall Rating
  Awesome: 16.87%
Worth A Look: 16.87%
Average: 13.25%
Pretty Bad: 30.12%
Total Crap: 22.89%
7 reviews, 41 user ratings
|
|
| Stay (2005) |
by William Goss
"The Surreal Strife"
|
A so-called psychological thriller, 'Stay' is a pretentious waste of time and talent that would have done no harm collecting dust in a studio vault as opposed to teasing its audience with the prospect of an intriguing premise and solid cast. Solely thought-provoking in the sense of rationale and running time, 'Stay' should have done so.Sam (Ewan McGregor) is a psychiatrist who has agreed to treat Henry (Ryan Gosling), an unstable patient who announces his intent to kill himself in three days. With the help of his girlfriend, Lila (Naomi Watts), he tries to prevent Henry’s suicide as his own grip on reality begins to unravel.
From the outset, the story meanders as Sam tries to find and stop Henry. Soon, Sam meets Henry’s allegedly deceased parents and experiences other strange circumstances that bring his sanity into question. The role of Lila, Sam’s girlfriend, fails to serve a real purpose, and a blind professor (Bob Hoskins) succumbs to the same fate. A weak climax on the Brooklyn Bridge leads to one of the more common cop-outs in recent cinema, a lame cheat which has been done to better effect in several other films and makes the preceding all the less worthwhile.
Director Marc Forster has little to offer, filming scenes in a most diagonal manner while finding any excuse to create a stylized transition between sterile shots, the surreal result of which quickly wears off. The entire cast is put to minimal use: McGregor and Watts get another chance to hone their American accents, while Gosling keeps up his tradition of flat roles with his typical angst and torment. Even Janeane Garofalo makes a brief, bizarre appearance as Henry’s former shrink, a performance that fails to do her (or anyone else) any favors.
The visuals are borderline nausea-inducing, from constant scene repetition to subliminal flashes, which become increasingly annoying in their attempt to depict a moody and sinister alternate reality. The film’s atmosphere aspires to be bleak, but is only successful in eliminating any hope for a tolerable cinematic experience. With a wasted cast and a plodding plot, the film is a genuinely unsatisfying effort at something resembling a psychological thriller and is probably more effective at provoking headaches than anything else. If viewers are nearly as smart as the movie presumes they are, they’ll know better than to Stay.At the screening, on the next-to-last reel, people starting walking upside-down and talking backwards. It took a handful of critics several minutes to figure out that this wasn't an intentional technique. Enough said.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13272&reviewer=409
originally posted: 10/25/05 15:31:49
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
21-Oct-2005 (R)
DVD: 28-Mar-2006
UK
03-Mar-2006
Australia
03-Nov-2005
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
