It's a great thing to go to a movie and bond with the people you go with. What's not so great is when you are bonding with people who you don't know because you're standing around outside the theater post-movie all wondering what the bumble-booty just happened.

"Wait, was he alive?"

"Is he, him?"

"Why then, did the blind man see again?"

"Are we here?"

These are the types of questions my newfound friends and I found ourselves asking after attending a screening of the screwy thriller Stay.

Stay is the work of director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Monster's Ball) and writer David Benioff about a Manhattan psychiatrist Sam (Ewan McGregor), his girlfriend Lila (Naomi Watts) and his patient Henry (Ryan Gosling), who Sam is trying to save from killing himself. And basically that's all there is to it. Oh, and there's a scene with some manatees swimming in an aquarium, and that's about where I lost it. And no, I'm not sure who "himself" is. He may be Henry and he may be Sam, or maybe it's both.

So, yeah ... anything more in depth than that, and it would get too messy for you to follow. Not to mention that I am not sure if I could explain it. The term "himself" is used loosely because, by the end of the movie, there's been so many dead/alive/flash-forward moments, one can't be too careful who is who, what is what, or if the ending that is supposed to pull it all together is at all in coherence with the rest of the movie.

Now, I know plenty of movies -- Fight Club, The Sixth Sense -- mix dead and alive, real and imagined -- testing the boundaries between the two, but in the end those movies come together and those movies make sense. Nothing comes together in Stay, and any philosophical meaning is lost because there isn't anything logical from which it can build.

From about 30 seconds in, Stay bombards you with one surrealist, supposed-to-freak-you-out angle and special effect after another. The story is lost in a muddle of confusion, canted angles (seriously, every angle is off-base), random infiltration of identically dressed twins and triplets, jump cuts, blurred images and odd stylistic tendencies. Like, what is this, a film school experiment?

It's OK to follow a style and genre, but it's not cool when the director and writer blatantly try and manipulate every word, sound and picture to try and elicit fear and curiosity from the audience.

Not only is this ineffective, but it makes a mockery of the money and time spent seeing the movie.

I am really an easy viewer to please and an easy person to scare, and I was neither pleased nor scared. The only creepy thing about the whole movie is the music and sound editing, which, while valuable, is only as good as the images that go along with it.

The acting is pretty lame, one-dimensional and predictable, but then again, there's really not much -- if anything -- for the actors to work with. Maybe they, too, were confused.

You might as well just drink a fifth and skip the movie; things will still make more sense tomorrow. Or yesterday.