The film is about Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), a psychiatrist. This doctor faces a new patient, college student Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), who claims to be a suicide bomber. Henry appears to be killing himself in three days, but Tayeb is already trying to save him.
There's a lot of talent at work here from the cast to the screenwriter to the director and the visuals, but it's all so arbitrary and cheap and the payoff is so, so lame.
Christianity Today
October 11, 2006
Ultimately the film delivers such a weak payoff that it makes nearly everything that came before it seem rather pointless.
Cinema Crazed
April 29, 2009
A sappy melodrama touted in a supernatural angle...
It is both straightforward and abstract, using cinematic tricks to put the audience in Sam/Henry's headspace. The result is a bit a sense of intentional vertigo that may cloud the films ultimately humanist point.
The effect is something indescribably cinematic, as the inner mechanics of the mind's eye are vividly translated onto the big screen. Beautiful, haunting and ultimately transcendent...
S lot of talent gets expended in Stay. (I'm not including whoever dressed McGregor.) Too bad the movie they made, while effective in short spurts, is almost a complete waste of time.
It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.
ColeSmithey.com
April 19, 2009
Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling all lower their box office merit with this unbaked psychological thriller about a suicidal man (Gosling) taunting his eccentric psychologist (McGregor) after surviving a horrible car accident.
Stay is interesting, but it's hard to recommend to anyone but the small cadre of David Lynch devotees who will inhale anything with a whiff of similarity to their favorite auteur's scent.
