After The Sixth Sense opened in 1999 to a box-office gold mine, Hollywood began hunting for more, similarly twisty thrillers that keep audiences guessing.
No one has perfected a formula yet, but this much is true: for the first fifteen-sixteenths, the film can be as confusing or as complex as necessary. The magic comes in the final reveal. If you have a movie as good as The Sixth Sense, the reveal will shed new light on everything that took place before it, all the clues will click into place, and everyone will be properly surprised.
In lesser films, the reveal leaves a few clues unchecked, or worse, betrays everything that took place before, such as in the recent Flightplan. Now, with Marc Forster's Stay, the formula mutates a little further.
Stay certainly sets up its fair share of clues. It begins with New York psychiatrist Sam Foster (McGregor), who dresses in a mishmash of tweedy suits and vests and London-mod clothing straight out of Blow Up, complete with poofy hair.
Sam lives with his beautiful girlfriend Lila (Watts), supposedly a former patient who once tried to kill herself and now paints and teaches art classes. Sam's world turns upside down when he meets Henry Letham (Gosling), a promising artist who pledges to commit suicide on the night of his 21st birthday.
Sam springs into action to try and stop him. He hops all over New York trying to dig into Henry's past, but he keeps running into ghosts—figuratively, literally and/or both. He begins having weird visions, seeing the same scenes twice and hearing words over and over again.
All of this leads up to a promising reveal but what we get is a great big "huh?" Forster and writer David Benioff chuck the logic from the first fifteen-sixteenths of the film in the hopes that their ending will blow our short-term memory circuits.
Technically, Forster continues to wander in search of a style but during his travels he has failed to land anywhere or grasp anything. Stay packs its frames with tricky transitions, useless gimmick shots and distracting effects. These serve to distance the film from reality and only increase the sense of disappointment when the answer to the puzzle finally arrives.
Keeping viewers guessing is a noble tradition that assumes clever viewers and even cleverer filmmakers, but Stay banks on the notion that everyone is too dumb to notice.