University psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor), covering for a colleague mysteriously absent from work, receives a visit from an art student named Henry, who has set his car abalze while it was parked on the Brooklyn Bridge. Played with just the right amount of intensity and brooding by Ryan Gosling from The Notebook, Henry informs Dr. Foster that in three days, he plans to kill himself.

Apparently unsure how to handle this, Foster looks for answers from his girlfriend (Naomi Watts), an art professor who survived her own suicide attempt, and a blind colleague played by Bob Hoskins. He begins to investigate Henry and before you can bump The Sixth Sense up on your Netflix queue, he’s seeing dead people and encountering all manner of reality bending phenomena.

Stay was written by David Benioff, whose spec script sold to New Regency for $1.8 million in 2001. David Fincher flirted with the project, but Marc Forster was eventually hired to direct. Forster has done solid work with two vastly different styles, directing Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland. A supernatural thriller seemed like another intriguing departure, even though it sat in Fox’s vault for over a year before vaporizing in its first weekend of release.

The movie gets going without opening credits, immediately hurtling us into a CGI enhanced car accident as viewed from the perspective, I guess, of a lug nut. At first, I thought this was a wicked new logo for a production company, the kind that routinely run three or four deep before movies get started these days, but no, this was the movie.

Stay is ridiculously tweaked up from the get-go and doesn’t detox at any point from there. Here’s a flick that if you walked into while it was playing on TV, you would swear was a commercial, until your mom told you it was a movie that came in the mail. See, there’s Obi Wan.

Ewan McGregor confirms the problems I had with Big Fish and The Island, both of which were good, in spite of his shortcomings as a leading man. He’s a lightweight presence, a decent role player or buddy, but woefully miscast in anything that requires him to serve as a strong, decisive catalyst for story.

His part here is a total blank and McGregor doesn’t seem to have figured out what to do with him. The characters played by Gosling and Watts, bathed in suicidal tendencies and each haunted by their own ghosts, were far more intriguing to me, and played by much, much better actors.

Benioff’s script drifts around, punctuated occasionally with lifeless dialogue, something that infected his scripts for 25^th Hour and Troy as well. The writing feels paralyzed from the neck down, as if Benioff figured the way to write about the spirit realm was to roll over and play dead.

In a wacky contrast, Forster employs every optical effect or jarring camera angle from the Michael Bay playbook in an effort to disorient the audience. In addition to the lug nut POV, characters walk through doors and find themselves in completely different locations, descend endless staircases or encounter weird déjà vu. I can respect Forster for making a movie totally unlike any other he’s done, but his attempt to create a dreamscape here is just too dizzy for anyone not on prescription meds to follow.

Stay was fast tracked to end up a Worst Movie Ever, but Benioff avoids a nosedive by tying up all loose ends in a scene the filmmakers had to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge to get on film. There’s some intriguing philosophical pining here, and at least nobody was out to rip off M. Night Shyamalan per se. It’s just bloody awful to see people as talented as Forster, Watts and Gosling – who reminded me of a young Robert DeNiro here – stuck in this nightmare.