New York psychiatrist Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) has a new patient, a secretive and highly unusual art student named Henry Latham (Ryan Gosling) he inherited from another therapist. Henry is an odd bird, rambling incoherently and prone to surreal self-destructive behavior that seems to come out of nowhere. He also plans to kill himself, kill himself standing on the Brooklyn Bridge at the stroke of midnight on his 21^st birthday.

While the former problems can be treated, the latter has to be stopped, Sam is racing against time to save Henry from doing himself in. But the more he learns about the young man, the deeper he’s drawn into his patient’s life, the more the psychiatrist’s own world starts to fall apart. Reality begins to crack, days bleed one into the other, events repeat themselves and – quite literally – the blind suddenly see. It’s all taking it’s toll, and the closer the clock gets to zero-hour the more Sam comes to realize the life he’s trying to save might not be Henry’s but his own.

Set in a surreal world lying somewhere between life and death, Marc Forster’s (“Finding Neverland”) fourth feature “Stay” is an obvious “Twilight Zone” mind-bender for the hard-core David Lynch fan club set. It is a jittery, over-caffeinaited thriller that obviously thinks it’s far more interesting, intelligent and entertaining than it actually is. David Benioff’s (“The 25^th Hour”) screenplay is a twisty labyrinth of cliché and originality smashing one into the other, their pieces intermingling so thoroughly it’s hard to know where the maudlin stops and the admittedly fantastic begins.

So “Stay” is not terrible. The movie is impossible to take your eyes off of and the acting is universally excellent. McGregor (who seems to like reality blender features like this), Gosling (almost making me forget he was so terrible in last year’s dreadful tearjerker “The Notebook”), Naomi Watts (beautifully playing Sam’s painter girlfriend who knows a little something about suicide) and Bob Hoskins (a fellow doctor who might know more about Henry than he’s letting on) all turn in fine and delicately shaded performances. Each taps into the material, running full speed with their characters and giving the writer’s words an authority and intensity they might not otherwise achieve without their efforts.

Still, I’m hard-pressed to not say it’s all given in a lost cause. I’m all for giant brain-twisting theatrical puzzle boxes (“Blue Velvet,” “12 Monkeys” and “Mullholland Dr.” are three of my favorites, after all) but this one is almost too much to be bothered with. Are Henry and Sam the same person? Does Henry have the power to stop time in its tracks? Has Sam, so obsessed with saving his patient, unwittingly unlocked a door allowing the dead to roam the Earth and fractured the space-time continuum allowing events to repeat themselves? Is his girlfriend (and hopefully fiancée) also a brown-haired actress Henry wanted to marry? Is it all the fevered dream of a dying man making up a surrealistic bedtime story before passing into the great beyond? Is Henry Jesus Christ reborn sent to uncover the world’s sins, choosing Sam as his instrument to do it? The answers to these and so many other questions I admit to not knowing. Of course, if even a small ounce of the whole thing even attempted to make a lick of sense I’d probably feel like deciphering it all more completely.

None if it makes sense, though, not for a single second, and from the first (highly impressive) frame it was clear Foster was more concerned about the film’s style than any of it’s substance. Sure, the visuals are fantastically impressive (I can’t help but think both cinematographer Roberto Schaeffer and editor Matt Cheseé deserve some sort of hazard pay for having to assemble all of this), you can only use so much misdirection and over-saturate so many frames of film stock before it all starts to blur together. In all honesty, by the time Forster and Benioff reach their conclusion (which, looking back on it, would be sort of neat if it didn’t make the proceeding 90 minutes a waste of time), I had a headache so throbbing I simply didn’t care.

Don’t get me wrong, Forster is an interesting director full of talent. Both “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” while not quite the masterpieces some would lead you to believe, are still awfully good. These are character-driven features, poignant and heartfelt commentaries on who we are as human beings completely unafraid to dive into gray areas so many other filmmakers (and movie studios) are afraid to tread. So he’s a good, maybe even a great director, and every acclaimed filmmaker is allowed a stinker from time to time.

“Stay” is his. For all the abundant visual style and some unsettling camera tricks, there’s nothing beneath the surface here making the whole thing pretty unremarkable. Benioff’s script meanders from here to there, and while the Rod Serling netherworld he and Forster create is consistently intriguing it is only so for all the wrong reasons. By the midpoint, I stopped wanting to know what was going on and started becoming curious as to what point it was going to fall apart. Which it finally does, and for all the sweat and tears committed to bring it together the best thing I finally decided any of us can do in regards to this is simply stay away.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)