The Forgotten Ryan Gosling Mystery Thriller On Streaming With A Star-Studded Cast
The twisty, complicated psychological thriller Stay is streaming now on Hulu. The 2005 film stars Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, and Naomi Watts and has been called everything from confusing to brilliant.
The story follows psychiatrist Sam Foster (McGregor) who, in an attempt to keep his patient Henry Letham (Gosling) becomes increasingly drawn into an experience that seems to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.
Stay – starring Ryan Gosling, Ewan McGregor, and Naomi Watts – is streaming on Hulu.
Stay came in the year following Ryan Gosling’s huge success in The Notebook, and the same year as Ewan McGregor’s final big screen appearance as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. Naomi Watts, who plays Sam’s girlfriend and confidant Lila Culpepper, would star as Ann Darrow in Peter Jackson’s King Kong just two months later, though she was already a star. But all that star power couldn’t propel Stay to success at theatres.
It might just be that the Ryan Gosling thriller bears repeated viewings and requires greater investment from its audience than the adventure, sci-fi, and romance films that each of these actors appeared in.
[T]he legendary Roger Ebert shaved only a half a star off out of four stars for his review, saying audiences need to “think back through” the entire film after watching it.
The film’s trailer alone is a time- and space-bending collage of moments, images, and elements that imply both the confusing nature of the film and its seemingly supernatural elements. That combination might have caused audiences to steer clear of the film, or to leave the theatre confused about what they had just seen.
This doesn’t mean Stay isn’t worth another look, though. In fact, it was the complexity and density of the Ryan Gosling film that the critics at the time who seemed to “get” it praised. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, for instance, gave the movie four out of five stars, saying that while some found it “pretentious,” he found it “provocative.”
Similarly, the legendary Roger Ebert shaved only a half a star off out of four stars for his review, saying audiences need to “think back through” the entire film after watching it, saying that its ending revelation is “an explanation, but not a solution.”
These reviewers seem to have found more than the star power of Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, and Naomi Watts to enjoy in Stay, discovering a complex, mysterious film that requires some engagement and thought to fully comprehend and appreciate.
Coming off the success of Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, director Marc Forster drew inspiration from films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense thriller Vertigo. He also drew on the work of director Nicolas Roeg, well known for the David Bowie science fantasy drama The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Ryan Gosling was not in Stay for his heartthrob status either, helping to propel the mystery and trepidation of the film. As McGregor’s character Sam gets pulled deeper into the bizarre and unexplained appearances of long-dead people, the veil between life and death seems ever thinner. His performance leans into his darker dramatic abilities to great effect.
If you like a movie that invites you on an unusual journey and engages your imagination as well as your puzzle-solving abilities, you might well find Stay an intriguing alternative.
Stay was written by David Benioff, who had written Troy the previous year and would go on to co-create Game of Thrones. Both the script and what appears onscreen are important to the story of the film, with details that might at first seem unimportant or even accidental becoming clues to unlocking the mystery.
Forster has remarked that elements of the film that seem like continuity errors are actually important and help the audience decode what is going on.
If that alone sounds more intriguing than your average Ryan Gosling film, Stay is probably worth your time. It’s clear that the film does not rely on conventional writing of visual storytelling methods, instead creating a confusing world of mystery and intrigue that audiences are left to fully unravel on their own.
If you like a movie that invites you on an unusual journey and engages your imagination as well as your puzzle-solving abilities, you might well find Stay an intriguing alternative.
While Ryan Gosling stars as Ken in the smash hit Barbie, currently in theaters, it’s fascinating to look back on a much lesser known work of his that seems to revel in obfuscation and misdirection. Twists and turns await you in this dizzying thriller that explores the minds of its characters in bizarre and intriguing ways. It’s not often one finds a film that has been lost to time and deserves a second or third look, but Stay is one of those discoveries
