In Stay, now streaming on Hulu, writer-director Jas Summers brings us a film with its share of Spooky Season seasoning – what do you mean a couple’s former home together won’t let them leave? – but also a heaping helping of emotional trauma. For Kiara (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Miles (Mo McRae), their marriage was once the greatest thing ever, a link to the love that guided their ancestors. But when we meet them in Stay, those feelings have since been replaced by rawness. When things start getting crazy in the house they used to share, they don’t know if it’s connected to their separation, or a supernatural bit of something else entirely.
The Gist: Everything was beautiful on their wedding day, and their home was lit in warm light as they started their life together. But cut to now and Kiara (Echikunwoke) is packing boxes as she slaps a “Broken” Post-It on the record player Miles (McRae) bought for her birthday. He’s coming by later to pick up his stuff, but all she wants to do is drink and forget.
The light changes in the house as Kiara tries to write a letter to Miles, tries to write down her tortured feelings. We also hear a buzzing noise – sort of like a faraway swarm of flies, or one of those rubberband propellers on a toy plane. Kiara seems to doze off, and when she awakens disoriented, copies of the bestseller she wrote about her grandmother, a practitioner of Vodún in the West African country of Benin, have been stuffed in the oven. The poltergeist-like stuff doesn’t stop when Miles shows up, but despite being suddenly, seemingly magically confined in the house, he can only see the disturbance as more fallout from their fractured marriage. Kiara scoffs at him, angry. “Crazy drunk Kiara, with her books and spells.”
She says their couples therapy only strengthened his hero complex. He says her traditional beliefs – and the drinking – drove them apart. But what’s left unsaid between Kiara and Miles is the core trauma they share, something we get the sense they’ve never been able to say out loud. It’s too powerful. It’s too sad. Still, as the house seems to react against them, and Kiara sees a vision of herself as a Vodún priestess in the mirror before reaching her whole body into it, they remain thrown back together. For guidance, Kiara looks to the symbol for Ọya, the female deity detailed in her Grandmother’s spell book. She’s freaked out at all the goings-on, and Miles remains a skeptic. What better time to seek the strength of ancestors for help, or protection?
Get used to the house. It’s the setting of Stay throughout, and variously, it’s either watching them, taunting them, or refusing to leave their past together alone. Mementos of their married life keep resurfacing, or moving into view, and with flashbacks and dream sequences, we learn a great deal about how the home was always at the center of their love. No wonder it won’t let them leave now. Gathering her materials for a religious ritual – her mother’s salt, an amethyst amulet – Kiara puts her differences and dramas with Miles aside and compels him to join her. It’s like the sentiment expressed in their old love letters. When did they stop fighting for one another? As the house’s buzzing returns and Kiara begins the ceremony with a traditional dance, she hopes to conjure strength. “In this realm, you never know what you will find or what will be revealed.”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? If a movie basically has only two actors in it, chemistry is key between those leads, and Megalyn Echikunwoke and Mo McRae might have established their groove from having worked together before. A few years back, Echikunwoke and McRae co-starred with Brittany Snow in the one-season-and-done Fox drama Almost Family. And while this Stay streams on Hulu, don’t get it twisted with the other Stay that streams on Hulu, a 2005 thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
Performance Worth Watching: In Stay, the connection between Echikunwoke and McRae is at its strongest whenever the film turns toward the glut of emotions left un-addressed in the breakup of Kiara and Miles’ marriage.
Memorable Dialogue: “I remember a legend in Benin,” Kiara tells Miles, “about a spirit that traps people in the house.”
Sex and Skin: Nothing really.
Our Take: In Stay, we really liked how the house that surrounds and confines Kiara and Miles becomes a whole different character between them. Spatially, it often seems to change shape. Visually, it can be hard to pin down. And aesthetically, director Jas Summers makes interesting choices with the lighting, and shuttling between color and black-and-white film, to always adjust what the house means to the film’s main characters. Has it turned against them? Twisted Kiara’s belief system? Or has it become the physical embodiment of their deepest traumas? If you’re looking for freaky moments to fill out your October viewing, you might find them in the halls of this place.
But Stay has more to say than simply going bump in the night. We believed in Kiara and Miles more and more with each piece of knowledge gleaned about their relationship. For as powerfully as Echikunwoke and McRae play the shared hurt between them, to us that suggested the better place where they once were. Add in a load of unreliable flashbacks, which might be memories, nightmares, or even visions, and we really liked how Stay kept us wondering about whether to be frightened or heartened.
Our Call: Stream It. You can definitely add Stay to your Spooky Season playlist – there is a freaky sense of foreboding in a lot of this film. But you might also get caught up in the story of two people trying to find their way back to love.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.