stay

Director: marc forster

Actor: ewan mcgregor,naomi watts,ryan gosling,kate burton

Data Published: Fri Oct 21 2005

Genres: Drama,Mystery,Thriller

Key Words: hallucination,dying,art student,car accident,nonlinear timeline

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371257/

WIKI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay_(2005_film)

Description: Stay is a movie starring Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, and Ryan Gosling. A psychiatrist attempts to prevent one of his patients from committing suicide while trying to maintain his own grip on reality.

Plot: The film opens with a car crash on the Brooklyn Bridge, and introduces Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), a survivor of the crash, sitting, unharmed, next to a burning car on the bridge. Psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) and his girlfriend (and former patient), Lila (Naomi Watts) are then introduced in a new scene. Sam discusses his patient, Henry, a college student and aspiring artist whom he describes as depressed and paranoid, with feelings of guilt and remorse over having 'set fire to' his car at the beginning of the film. Henry mentions that he sometimes hears voices, and seems able to predict future events. Henry is also suspicious of Sam because he had suddenly been called to stand in for his regular psychiatrist, Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo). Henry has told Sam of his plans to kill himself that Saturday at midnight. Lila, who has survived a past suicide attempt, offers to help to dissuade Henry from killing himself. Sam investigates Henry's circumstances and, after repeatedly attempting to reach Dr. Levy, he comes to her apartment to find her disoriented and lethargic, mumbling incoherent phrases like "I didn't touch him; I know you're not supposed to move them," occasionally belittling Sam with a maudlin reference to an implied unresolved tension between the two, and the fact that she's aware that he's dating an ex-patient. Henry, who had earlier claimed to have killed both of his parents, has his account contradicted by Sam when he finds Henry's mother (Kate Burton) and her dog living in a bare house, confused about Sam's identity (she insists that he is Henry) and refusing to respond to his questions. Henry's mother insists on feeding Sam, but when she opens the fridge it is completely empty. Her head starts bleeding and when Sam attempts to help her, her dog bites him. At the clinic, whilst having his dog-bitten arm treated, Sam discusses the visit with a present police officer (Michael Gaston) who is curious as to why he would visit that house. Sam explains what happened, but the police officer tells him that he had attended the funeral for the woman who lived there several months ago. This seems to send Sam into a fugue in which the same scene and dialogue is repeated several times. Later, Sam contacts a waitress named Athena (Elizabeth Reaser), with whom Henry has mentioned that he had fallen in love. She is an aspiring actress and he meets her at a script reading where she is reading lines from Hamlet with another man. She agrees to take him to Henry, but after a long trip down winding staircases he loses her. When he gets back to the rehearsal room, she is there reading the same lines as when he first encountered her. The search continues until 11:33 pm on Saturday, less than half an hour before Henry plans to kill himself. At a bookshop known to have been frequented by Henry, Sam finds a painting that Henry had painted and bartered for books about Henry's favorite artist. He learns that the artist killed himself on the Brooklyn Bridge on his twenty-first birthday. Henry's twenty-first birthday is Sunday, and Sam realizes that Henry plans to commit suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge in imitation of the artist. Sam finds Henry on the Brooklyn Bridge in a physical atmosphere (fog-like) that is increasingly unraveling. After failing to dissuade Henry, Sam turns away as Henry puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. The car crash of the first scene is then reprised. Henry was fatally wounded in the crash but, in his last moments, is suffering survivor guilt. Each of the characters introduced earlier in the film was in fact a random spectator at the site of the crash, including Sam (a doctor), and Lila (a nurse), who treat Henry in an attempt to save him. The brief remarks they make are the same ones heard previously by their counterparts earlier. They fail to rescue Henry, and Henry dies, but not before seeing Lila as Athena and proposing to her, which Lila accepts out of sympathy. The entire film up until Henry's death had perhaps existed only in his mind during his last moments. However, there are clues that the people surrounding Henry as he lay dying were actually drawn into another world in some way. For instance, after Henry dies and is being loaded into a body bag, Beth Levy's counterpart is heard telling her name to the police as Elizabeth Levy. Since Henry died before hearing this, he would have no way of knowing how to "dream" her true name. Additionally, before parting, Sam appears to get a flash in his mind of the experiences and asks Lila out for coffee.