r. Sam Foster (McGregor) is a psychiatrist who lives with a prior patient, suicide survivor Lila Culpepper (Watts). One day, he agrees to take over the case of troubled young artist Henry Letham (Gosling), after the nervous collapse of Letham's prior therapist Dr. Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo).
The initially uncommunicative and hostile Letham tells Foster that he intends to commit suicide at midnight, this coming Saturday. Foster's attempts to intervene all come to naught as the world around the concerned young doctor grows increasingly more dreamlike and disturbing, in manifestations that range from encounters with people who should be dead, to strange voices heard in passing, to a strange little boy who twice loses the same mylar balloon in the same alley.
Letham mouths Foster's words even as the doctor attempts to confront him. The little boy asks, "Is that man going to die?" Identically dressed twins and triplets multiply among the extras. And a blind acquaintance of Foster's (Hoskins) shows up with perfect vision, delighted to announce that the world is all a dream.
We get it. We all get it. It's so obvious, to anybody who's paying attention, that a SPOILER WARNING is superfluous. (You're getting one anyway. SPOILER WARNING.) The only remaining question is, just whose near-death dream are we seeing?
Occurrence at a larger bridge
Stay begins with Letham sadly striding away from his flaming automobile, which he later says he set on fire because he felt like it. He's later adamant that his parents are dead. When his mother (Kate Burton) shows up drifting around the rooms of an empty house, bleeding profusely from an unexplained wound on the side of her head, it doesn't take much familiarity with the conventions of fantasy to figure out just where he really is, and why the reality around him seems to be so fluid. It's just a matter of marking time until we find ourselves back on the Brooklyn Bridge, in the immediate vicinity of that same totaled auto, while somebody's heart flutters between life and death.
It is, in fact, down to the bridge location, pretty much the same device used by Ambrose Bierce in his famous short story "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (which many will know only as the basis of a powerful short film that aired on Rod Serling's original Twilight Zone). Stay wouldn't be the first full-length movie to attempt the same basic idea (see Jacob's Ladder), but it's hard to maintain at such extended length, and Stay doesn't quite manage it. The few genuinely chilling sequences (such as a descent down a spiral staircase that, Foster suddenly realizes, seems to go down forever) fail to enliven a narrative that has already given us all the necessary clues within the first half-hour.
The one compelling element? Director Foster accentuates the overall level of oddness with an editing scheme that matches the visual elements of each scene to the visual elements of the scene that follows. These transitions are so stunning that they jump-start the moribund story for entire seconds at a time. And they do pay off, brilliantly, at the climax. Just about every weird thing experienced by the characters along the way links up to what that poor accident victim sees as he lies on his back next to the wreckage of his life and car. But by then it's too little, too late. The movie is dead on arrival.
