Dead reckoning

Director Marc Forster, a product of New York University film school and life-defining personal tragedy, is the kind of cinephile who would see creating a thoughtful film about death in a thriller format as a challenge.

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There is nothing as profound nor as common as death. And yet few films have treated it in a way that captures the longing and never-healed wounds for those left behind.

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Forster, however, suffered loss at an early age, when his brother and father died in quick succession. He has founded his entire film career — from an early documentary on teenage suicide to the recent Finding Neverland to his latest, Stay — on pondering the enormity of death and the lingering grief it leaves behind.

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Death literally haunts Stay in the form of stricken, corpse-pale art student Henry Letham (Ryan Gosling), who informs psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) that he will kill himself in three days.

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Checking in regularly with his own formerly suicidal artist wife, Lila (Naomi Watts), for insights into the frail artistic temperament, Sam learns that Henry may be inspired by a dead artist who made conceptual art out of his own suicide.

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Screenwriter and novelist David Benioff invests Stay with some of the bone-deep regret that Spike Lee conveyed so masterfully in his film of a drug dealer contemplating the virtual death of prison in 25th Hour. There is an acquaintance with our own mortality, with the fragility and beauty of life that Benioff conveys in his writing and which a director as sensitive as Forster is able to put across to some extent in Stay.

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But too much of that despair gets lost in a distracting story line that becomes an even greater logistical muddle by the end.

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Stay evokes a mix of Forster's beloved '60s and '70s cinema — especially John Schlesinger and Nicolas Roeg — and a less interesting, less original contemporary thriller aesthetic. The film suggests Forster's desire to interweave the moral and psychological complexities of an art film with some of the flash of an old-fashioned bone-chiller, in the manner of cineast classics like Rosemary's Baby and Don't Look Now.

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Forster is indisputably a director of arresting contrasts, who generally manages to load his films with style without losing any of his sensitivity. But there are moments in Stay where certain choices — the maze-like reflective glass surfaces and modernist architecture that signal Sam's confusion, the repeated use of twins — counteract the film's emotional intensity.

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From Fight Club to the recent Courteney Cox thriller November, we've already seen countless Hollywood films that use art house ambiance and surreal touches as spooky effects. The appearance of a blind man (Bob Hoskins) is one of the more egregious examples of such thriller convention.

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Forster's use of jump cuts and repetition, derived from the cinema of Roeg and Schlesinger, is frantic, eerie and discombobulating, but it can often distract from the deep sadness and tragic qualities of Forster's film. So much time is spent pondering the meaning of small details and trying to resolve inconsequential mysteries and red herrings that the larger significance of the film tends to melt away.

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Forster's most profound contribution to the lore about death is his revelation that grief never ends, which Stay tentatively explores. Forster gives death the seriousness it deserves and if for no other reason, Stay should be watched for its final scene, which exceeds its thriller significance as the climactic mystery is revealed. That scene is the key to Forster, drenched in the agony of loss, guilt and the human desire to heal those wounds.