Stay Review

Nearly every transition here is a trick, and for forty minutes that is thrilling. Marc Forster and cinematographer Roberto Schaefer dissolve one room into another through a matching doorway, circle a spiral staircase until the geometry repeats, hand a walking character off to a stranger mid step, and let background figures recur like an error in the image.

The construction is sustained and genuinely difficult. It is also a long hallucination at the point of death, and once that is clear the film stops paying interest on anything it built. Ewan McGregor plays the psychiatrist with a furrowed decency that has nowhere to go, since the man turns out to be someone else's invention. Gosling gets the better part and the stranger notes: the flat voice, the burnt hands, the way he announces his own suicide date like a train time.

Naomi Watts is stranded with a wrist scar and little else to hold. The writing keeps reaching for portent, and the exchanges about time and forgiveness land as prose rather than speech. What survives is the look of the thing, especially the Brooklyn Bridge wreck staged as a slow ring of halted traffic, and a final walk through a New York that keeps folding back onto itself.