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Stay
EMAILPRINTTwentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 29 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 45 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: David Benioff
Directed by: Marc Forster
Release Date:
Theatrical: October 21, 2005
DVD: March 28, 2006
Running Time: 99 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for language and some disturbing images
Starring Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Kate Burton, Naomi Watts, Elizabeth Reaser, Bob Hoskins, Janeane Garofalo, and B.D. Wong
In this psychological thriller, a distraught young man announces to his psychiatrist that he plans to commit suicide in three days. The psychiatrist's desperate attempts to help his new patient lead him through the city on an incredible, nightmarish trip to the place between life and death. (20th Century Fox)
Also On Metacritic
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The ending is an explanation, but not a solution. For a solution we have to think back through the whole film, and now the visual style becomes a guide. It is an illustration of the way the materials of life can be shaped for the purposes of the moment.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Some people find this twisty and twisted psychological thriller arty and pretentious. I find it arty and provocative.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Yet for a film so affectingly steeped in loss, resignation and the ghosts of memory, the revelation that pulls it all together, while satisfying and even touching, lacks emotional resonance.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Despite the actors, the visuals and Forster's directorial swagger, the movie lacks impact.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
It's all very deep, but in a tricked-up, art-directed sort of way.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
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.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
In Stay, the director, Marc Forster, fresh from "Finding Neverland," turns Manhattan into a nightmarish dreamscape and his characters into self-destructive ghosts.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Stay is all dressed up with no place to go, an eye-popping exercise in lavish style unattached to any discernible content.
Read Full Review >Premiere Ryan Devlin
A quarter of the way through the film, it’s all just too much.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Eventually I gave up on meaning and began instead to study the profuse imagery -- and also the flat characters and anchorless performances.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Forster should be commended for attempting something as daunting as the overreaching Stay, which despite all of its muddled logic and porous reality – or perhaps because of it – forces you to think, a genuine rarity these days.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Yet another variation on the theme of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." If you've read the short story, you'll see where things are going in no time flat; if you haven't and want to be surprised, don't look it up.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
With its flashy, pretentious visual effects, this is really a 98-minute dream sequence--though it's worth recalling that the most effective dream sequences tend to be only a few minutes long.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
If you're the kind of moviegoer who likes puzzling out the plots of insoluble movies, then by all means rush to see Stay, a great big blurry mess.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Rachel Aviv
In Marc Forster's humorless thriller, going insane is an exciting, luxurious affair. People suffer stylishly; depressives are angry and dirty; they make art, carry guns, and live in magnificent houses.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Nathan
The type of movie often described as a fever-dream: weird, offbeat, otherworldly… An experience that also coincides with feeling ill.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
The final twist does more to unravel what's come before than to tie it all together, making what's come before feel like a cosmopolitan goose chase.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
There's really not much of an audience for this picture. The movie demands that its viewers put the fragmented images and information together like an intellectual jigsaw puzzle, but it never gives those viewers a good reason to do so.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
It's become a tired cliché for characters in "serious" science-fiction movies not to realize they're dead or dying, but Stay as a film doesn't seem to realize that it's dead from the outset, an unconvincing automaton grimly going through the motions.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
An ultra-arty "The Sixth Sense" that deliberately inhibits comprehension of the story until the very end -- and arguably continues to inhibit it even then -- pic features certifiably talented people on both sides of the camera collaborating on a project that probably shouldn't have been undertaken in the first place.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
If "The Sixth Sense" was a bad movie redeemed by its surprise ending, Marc Forster's Stay is a seemingly good movie leading to a devastating letdown.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Gosling's been better elsewhere but delivers an adequate performance. McGregor and Watts seem baffled most of the time, as well they might be. Forster keeps us from drifting off with inventive camerawork; in this case, that's like saying a hideous suit has well-stitched lapels.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
That mind-bending, mystical business was better handled in such films as 1990's "Jacob's Ladder."
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis that almost makes you sorry Nicolas Roeg isn't making pictures anymore.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Neva Chonin
Visuals can't fill a spiritual vacuum, and Stay remains a pretty package that's empty on the inside.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 45 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Pavel R gave it an8:
The directing, the script, the editing, the clothes, the colors...all add up to a means that makes the films more transcending than your average thriller.
Linda N gave it a10:
Even if you get confused, you should be able to appreciate this movie. Just enjoy the beauty and mystery of it. Relax and enjoy it--don't get all wrapped up in the fact that it "doesn't make sense" (yet). The ending reveals its secrets, and yet It holds up to multiple viewings. I think I loved it more the fourth time I saw it than the first.
blat kakakakack gave it a3:
Boooooo. I'm not smart enough to understand this genius film.
André F. gave it a10:
It can be quite confusing but don't wait the end to reveal it all.
Vitor V. gave it a10:
This is an intelligent film. See it if you know how to think.
[Anonymous] gave it a9:
I can see why many did not like this movie as it requires a bit of thought while watching. We have become so used to being "entertained" and not challenged while watching movies today. There are clues throughout the entire movie. Throughout the entire movie, you see all those standing around Henry after the accident. You hear Henry say to him that he did nothing wrong, that he tire blew because he was right behind him. You see the car swerve and roll on the bridge. All accidents that occur like that on bridges are usually multi-car accidents. My opinion: They are all dead, but don't realize it yet so they "stay" and function as if they were still alive. Henry was the only one that figured it out. He stated, "I have to wake up now." When the emergency crews arrived you didn't see them talk to Lila or Sam or any of the characters standing around him. You then see Sam meeting Lila and asking her to coffee while visions (actual memories) of them together ran through his mind. A brilliant film of how we hold on to life, even when it's gone.
Kate V. gave it an8:
It's a movie I probably would have given a 5 right after watching it, but it had a way of working on me and revealing its depth in the days afterwards. Stay really stayed with me, and I suspect it's a movie that will be even better on the second viewing.
