Embodying many of the worst aspects of self-consciously serious science fiction, from humorlessness to a flurry of highbrow references, the film casts a surprisingly stiff Ewan McGregor as a shrink who becomes obsessed with patient Ryan Gosling, a gifted yet haunted art student intent on committing suicide in three days, on the eve of his 21st birthday. Showing a level of concern and emotional investment rare in the psychiatric profession, McGregor races around New York trying to find Gosling before he can put himself—and, by extension, the film—out of his/its misery. But as increasingly freaky, Philip K. Dick-style shit starts to happen, the lines between reality, fantasy, the living, and the dead begin to blur, leading up to a twist ending audiences are programmed to see coming well in advance, both by the film's heavy-handed foreshadowing and because of its ubiquity in pretentious, dour science fiction like this. Who's dead? Who's alive? Is it all just a crazy dream? Unfortunately, with characters this shallow, performances this wooden, and dialogue this humorless and stilted (courtesy of 25th Hour scribe David Benioff), the answers to all those queries rapidly becomes "Who cares?"
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. Just because a movie is about the intersection of the living and the dead doesn't mean it should be devoid of life.
