Nathan Kornick | Stay / 2024

a confession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Kornick (screenwriter and director) Stay / 2024 [9.25 minutes]

 

The death of a loved one, and particularly when it’s a member of one’s family—someone with you’ve lived for so many years—is always a very personal thing, the emotions that surround it are part of a swirl of not only love, but anger, joy, hate, peace, and forgiveness that happen when one lives many years with anyone as a brother, sister, father, mother, and various other familial roles.

     And that set of personal feeling is nearly impossible to properly communicate, as this film reveals. It is hard for any of us to comprehend why the young man central to this work, Andrew (Gabe Malek) is still so obsessed with his older brother’s death, a man who had retreated to a hospice as he was dying of cancer.

      Obviously, he also feels great guilt, even after visiting his brother several times—particularly when his brother thanks him for all the visits—for not having stayed instead of returning to where his lover was living. The guilt seems all out to proportion to his decision.

      I too, caring almost single-handedly for my dying, father finally had to return home (he living in Iowa, I in Los Angeles), and he died within the next week. Yet I feel no deep remorse for having done what I had to do; there were business matters and my lover waiting at the other end. Moreover, I had a brother and sister who had refused, because of their own deep love of my father, to be around him as he was dying. My sister finally came to replace me in my absence, my brother, who perhaps loved my father the deepest of the three of us, simply could not manage to remain in the room with the man he saw dying.

      It would be nearly impossible, accordingly, to judge this film on what might first appear to be a minor and necessary decision, leaving his brother instead of remaining to see him into death, an act that perhaps even the brother might have approved of.

      Yet it might have helped us if screenwriter and director Kornick could have presented us with more information about how the brothers had related to one another throughout their lives. Had they always been close? Were there other reasons for Andrew to feel guilty about his leaving. Did Andrew’s homosexuality—he tells this story to his companion Michael (Marin Masar) who has failed to even remember that the day represented the third year after his brother’s death—have any impact upon their relationship? Where were the boy’s parents during all of this and what was their relationship with their boys like? Had they abandoned their dying son? Or had they previously died?

      The questions unspoken are nearly endless. And we find it, accordingly, nearly impossible to share in Andrew’s sorrow. We simply don’t have the links of emotional feeling to even comprehend his sense of guilt and overwhelming sorrow.

      These issues, moreover, are not helped by a vague visual presentation of the two central characters, both of whose hair seems often cover their faces and are represented in a milky white light that makes them both seem nearly lifeless, as if they too were phantoms possessed by the problems of the past.

       One might have comprehended the director’s decisions (no crew is listed for these roles) about light and makeup; perhaps he chose to show them in their own hidden worlds, as unknowable as real persons as their individual emotional responses. But without real or at least a simulacrum of a fully real person we feel as viewers even less inclined to explore these highly personal reactions to a now fairly long-ago death.

       In short, Stay certainly may mean well in its exploration of how the circumstances of a death in the family effect an individual; but without fully engaging it viewers, Andrew’s words fall on deaf ears, his tears don’t fully move our hearts. Who is this unhappy young man for whom evidently no one showed up to hear his third-year eulogy? And we certainly cannot blame the finally endlessly patient Michael for having failed to memorialize his lover’s painful day. He has done the best he can, in the end, by simply hearing out his partner’s confession. Can some one performing as a priest ever fully comprehend the personal guilt of the confessor? How then can he fully provide forgiveness, assign any contrition?

       The role of the viewer of Kornick’s film is asked to play has very few clues about how to interpret and explain the confessor’s painful guilt.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).