Stay (2005, USA)

More and more often, I see the legacy of Memento and The Sixth Sense in American indies, almost always with diminishing returns. Stay is a perfect example of this increasingly dull and predictable trend – an overly convoluted story that uses every possible narrative gimmick in order to forestall a painfully obvious “trick” ending. Perhaps the primary difference between the earlier films and Stay is the latter’s heavy use of visual tricks as well – it gallops right out of the gate, making it clear that there is nothing in this film that meets the eye, and thus making it absolutely impossible to care about anything it has to show its audience. Had Marc Forster built these elements into his film, rather than beating the audience about the head with them from minute one, perhaps the whole endeavor would have been less exhausting and pointless. However, in order to do so, he would have had to have something more to hang his film upon.

The story in Stay is weak at best, as psychologist Ewan McGregor (looking totally befuddled) and artist girlfriend Naomi Watts (with nothing much to do at all) try to puzzle out what exactly is torturing McGregor’s patient (Ryan Gosling). There might actually be something there if it weren’t so plainly obvious that Forster cares nothing about these characters, as he’s much more interested in how to tease his conceit – one person is constantly turning into another, or switching places with another, time and space jump about like an absurd game of leapfrog – to the maximum. In the end, Stay is really about nothing at all – it’s the worst kind of shaggy dog movie, as the audience ends up with less than what it started with.