Few things can be more cinematically frustrating than a film that is needlessly coy. The central twist in Stay, the horror film that will lead the “Huluween” slate this October on Hulu, is held at bay until the waning moments of its 80-minute runtime. But there is nothing to be gained from this delayed gratification, and Jas Summers’ film is, in fact, hindered by its insistence on keeping things out of the audience’s reach.
A swift tale, Stay is torn between being a supernatural horror and an earnest relationship drama; neither is given the due it might otherwise deserve. Why Kiara (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Miles (Mo McRae) have split up is a mystery. The film begins with a gorgeously sH๏τ, black and white montage of the couple’s wedding day before cutting to them in their new home in resplendent color, and then it abruptly smash cuts to the present day in moody blues with packing boxes. The economy of storytelling in the first three minutes is breathtaking, but unfortunately, the film goes downhill pretty fast.
Stay Is Packed With Trite Tropes
Told in uneven chunks between the present, where the ex-couple is planning on finally moving out of their shared home, and various parts of their past, Stay is convoluted upon delivery. Which is a shame, because being that the film is told in this way prevents us from caring at all about their breakup. Echikunwoke and McRae are stellar performers, and they give the film all they have, but there’s nothing here to indicate this is a couple that could actually work.
Kiara is a PhD in African Studies with a specialty in African spirituality; Miles is an ex-MMA fighter whose past gruesome injury has forced him into a new career as a gym owner. The two clearly have Sєxual chemistry, and repeтιтive flashbacks communicate how they may have, at one point, really liked each other.
But, in the present, they are as cruel as can be. He blames her for blowing the relationship up; she blames him for giving up too easily; he thinks she’s living in La La Land; she calls him a coward. It is tiresome to hear argument after argument with no specificity about what’s actually being talked about, and by the time we get a fuller picture of what happened between them, all potential for relating to either has dissipated.
As for Stay‘s horror elements, they are all inadvertently funny. Trope after trope is invoked as Kiara wanders around her house responding to creaky doors, a phonograph record that turns on by itself, her reflection staring back at her with evil eyes in the mirror, Miles being dragged across the floor by an invisible force. It’s all just very tired. When the film does have a good impulse — like forcing Miles to relive their breakup but through his ex-wife’s eyes — it abandons it almost immediately.
The final segment of the film finally reveals all: what broke this couple up, what is haunting them now, and what they have to do to break the curse. The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided. A lot of couples do struggle to stay together after what Kiara and Miles suffer through, but what do we gain by being told this information outside of traditional chronology? It only frustrates our ability to relate to the characters.
Stay is a horror film about how you can’t leave the proverbial house until you understand what’s keeping you inside. To put it another way, the film supposes that you can’t move forward without processing your pain. But if we don’t know what that pain is, why should we care about what plagues them?
