Few films mislead their audience quite like Stay, directed by Jas Summers and headlining Hulu’s much-hyped “Huluween” lineup. With glossy cinematography and an emotional opening montage, the movie promises a story blending heartfelt drama and psychological horror.
The first few minutes glide from black-and-white wedding bliss to saturated domestic scenes, and finally, to muted blues of a relationship in ruins. It’s a striking visual metaphor for love lost. Unfortunately, that emotional precision fades away soon after the credits stop rolling.
At its center are Kiara (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Miles (Mo McRae), a once-passionate couple now suffocating under regret and resentment. The film teases their complex past while forcing us into their chaotic present: two broken people packing boxes and throwing blame across a darkly lit home.
There’s texture in their pain, but Summers renders it shallow by keeping too much hidden for too long. The big twist, which arrives far too late, feels like the answer to a question we stopped asking.
Haunted by Style, Emptied of Substance
The idea behind Stay holds promise: two people trying to move out of a home that literally refuses to let them leave until they confront their shared trauma.
If handled with emotional sincerity and tension, that setup could make an impressive horror-drama hybrid. Instead, the movie feels afraid of its own themes, hiding behind standard genre tricks rather than confronting the emotional decay at its heart.
The film toggles awkwardly between timelines, showing fragments of happiness and resentment scattered across their relationship. This fragmented storytelling aims for depth but ends up draining empathy. Viewers aren’t guided through their heartbreak; they’re left guessing, and not in a good way.
The flashbacks, instead of expanding our understanding, crowd the narrative with repetitive arguments that loop without clarity and unspecific accusations that sound like a broken record.
Summers’ approach suggests that mystery equals meaning, but withholding context doesn’t make a story profound. Instead, it alienates.
As Kiara and Miles wander their house filled with boxes and ghosts, we sense the weight of something tragic, yet the screenplay keeps details just out of reach. By the time the truth about their breakup and haunting arrives, both revelations land with a faint echo instead of emotional thunder.
When Horror Forgets to Terrify
If Stay had leaned stronger into supernatural terror, it might have redeemed its pacing. But even the scares feel recycled. Kiara’s lonely walks through dim hallways, sudden creaks, and mirrors with sinister reflections tick off nearly every haunted house cliché in modern horror.
A phonograph starts playing by itself, Miles is dragged across the floor, and strange noises echo without a narrative purpose. These moments might once have worked in isolation, but lined up one after another, they inspire more eye-rolls than chills.
Stay (Credit: Netflix)
The tragedy is that Summers occasionally touches real promise. One sequence, in which Miles relives the breakup through Kiara’s perspective, briefly suggests that introspection and emotional horror could coexist. For a moment, the film gains texture.
But just when it could turn inward and reveal the couple’s true damage, the scene fades, replaced again by empty sensory scares. It’s a microcosm of the movie’s problems: compelling ideas surface, then vanish before they can mean something.
Hulu has positioned Stay as a “Huluween flagship,” yet it feels oddly unfinished. Its horror setup could have matched the platform’s earlier hits if the execution weren’t so uneven.
Instead, this film becomes symptomatic of Hulu’s recent streak of underwhelming originals, where aesthetics replace storytelling and twists exist just for the trailer.
The Tragedy Inside the Twist
The final act finally reveals what tore Kiara and Miles apart, what force now binds them, and how they might break free. The tragedy at the center is poignant on paper, a shared trauma that left them suspended between love and guilt, but its late introduction turns catharsis into confusion.
By saving every crucial revelation for the finale, Summers robs her characters of gradual evolution. Instead of watching two people slowly confront their ghosts, we’re handed an emotional dump moments before the credits roll.
It’s easy to sense what the director wanted: a story about how grief lingers like an unexorcised spirit. The house becomes a metaphor and a prison, a memory and a mistake.
Yet meaningful subtext can’t thrive when every symbol arrives bluntly and every scare repeats itself. What should feel haunting ends up hollow, like a memory repeated until it loses its weight.
Megalyn Echikunwoke and Mo McRae deserve credit for grounding such unfocused material. Their performances suggest emotional depth that the script fails to explore. You can see longing and resentment flicker across their faces even when dialogue falters.
Sadly, their effort highlights the movie’s missed opportunities. The emotional resonance is there, trapped beneath a script unwilling to let it breathe.
Why Stay Struggles to Stay With You
There’s a line buried beneath the noise: Stay wants to remind us that we can’t move forward until we confront our pain. It aims to turn emotional paralysis into supernatural horror, but in withholding that pain for most of the runtime, it severs the audience from its heart.
We never feel truly inside the couple’s experience, only near the surface of it, wandering the same haunted corridors they do, unsure what we’re looking for. Suspense becomes fatigue.
At its best moments, the film glimmers with craft, elegant lighting, a moody score, and sharp editing but form without function can’t sustain engagement. By the final scene, as the haunting resolves in a predictably tragic twist, many viewers will be reflecting less on the story’s message than on how frustratingly out of focus it felt.
Stay feels like a cautionary tale about modern streaming horror: promising setups sacrificed to maintain mystery, emotional depth traded for jump scares, and great actors stranded in half-realized arcs.
While it means well in its commentary on emotional imprisonment, its structure keeps it too distant to move us. The potential for a powerful exploration of love, grief, and spiritual reckoning is there, buried beneath formulaic scares and fragmented storytelling.
For a film that wants to be about confronting the truth, Stay hides far too much for far too long. The result is a technically competent yet spiritually hollow story that leaves both its characters and its viewers trapped in a loop of repetition.
Hulu’s horror experiment deserved better, especially from a film that promised to blend heartache and haunting into one unforgettable experience.
An atmospheric homage with warm hues and uneven pacing, The Oval Portrait invites viewers into a uniquely cozy yet eerie world. Adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s shortest story, the film attempts to combine elements of romantic gothic horror with a crime thriller.
While it succeeds in creating an inviting ambiance, the narrative’s slow progression, mixed performances, and occasionally shaky logic prevent it from fully realizing its potential.
A Tale Split Between Old Souls and Crime
The story pivots around three main characters: Whitlock, a cold and enigmatic antique shop owner; Ava, an aspiring romantic artist; and Julian, a thief caught between a criminal family’s demands and supernatural dangers lurking in Whitlock’s shop.
Whitlock’s antique store houses a photorealistic portrait that has piqued the interest of Grayson, son of the Bancroft crime family. Julian is tasked with stealing it, but previous theft attempts ended in mysterious disappearances.
Ava stands apart with her unconventional Luddite lifestyle, refusing cellphone or computer use, a trait that leads to her firing without warning.
After being dumped by a tech-obsessed boyfriend, Ava reconnects with Whitlock, finding in him a kindred spirit who shares her affinity for old-fashioned ways. Their gentle bond unfolds warmly, adding emotional texture amidst the eerie backdrop.
A Deeply Atmospheric Visual and Auditory Experience
Director Adrian Langley’s vision permeates every frame of The Oval Portrait. Undertaking the roles of writer, director, cinematographer, and editor, Langley’s strongest imprint is in the film’s visuals. The movie bathes the antique shop setting in warm, rich tones, inviting viewers into a space that feels both inviting and ominous.
This color palette adds layers of nostalgia counterpointed by whispering shadows and occasional ghostly apparitions, which effectively inject genuine moments of fear amid the calm.
Complementing the visuals, Andrew Morgan Smith’s score draws heavily from classic Hollywood horror traditions, evoking composers like Franz Waxman.
The music’s sweeping and haunting melodies lull the viewer, deepening the ambiance and enhancing the gothic romance vibe. This layering of mood and sound anchors the film’s strongest asset: its immersive environment.
Mixed Performances Underpin the Story
Michael Swatton brings gravitas and controlled intensity to Whitlock, whose measured speech and deliberate gestures are magnetic and set the emotional tone. In contrast, other performances falter.
Pragya Shail’s portrayal of Ava is uneven; her line delivery is occasionally awkward and unsure, which diminishes her character’s romantic appeal. Paul Thomas, as Julian, does his best to balance haplessness and resolve, but the script’s writing undermines the character’s potential depth.
The Oval Portrait (Credit: Northwest Motion Picture Corporation)
Simon Phillips, cast as the threatening Grayson, struggles to be convincing as a menacing mobster, reducing tension in key scenes.
These uneven performances underscore a fundamental issue: the characters feel underdeveloped and at times disconnected from each other, making the story’s emotional stakes harder to invest in.
A Slow-Burning Story With Repetitive Rhythms
The Oval Portrait unfolds at a decidedly unhurried pace. Its first act alone stretches nearly an hour, an eternity for viewers expecting a suspenseful horror thriller. This protracted introduction allows for quite a bit of visual and atmospheric indulgence but sacrifices narrative momentum.
The script often falls prey to repetition, with scenes revisiting the same themes or actions without advancing the plot meaningfully. This can frustrate viewers who crave clearer progression or stronger character development.
Additionally, some narrative elements strain credulity. Ava’s absence of basic technology while holding a technologically dependent job is an example, creating moments that unsettle logic and viewer immersion.
Langley’s decision to prioritize mood over momentum results in a film that is visually striking but occasionally slow in substance.
Blending Crime Drama With Gothic Romance
Poe’s original The Oval Portrait is brief, requiring creative expansion to reach feature length. Here, the film entwines a crime story seeking a mystical object with a delicate romantic undercurrent. While intriguing on paper, these genres seldom fully fuse in execution.
The criminal subplot involving Julian and the Bancroft family sometimes feels loosely attached, more a plot device than a thoroughly realized narrative thread. Meanwhile, the gothic romance between Ava and Whitlock offers sincere moments of warmth but lacks sufficient build-up or conflict to reach full emotional impact.
This mixture produces a film of tonal contrasts: old-fashioned love and eerie hauntings sit beside gritty criminal concerns, producing a unique but occasionally discordant effect.
The Strength of Ambiance Over Story
If The Oval Portrait had a single, undeniable quality, it would be its ambiance. Viewers are drawn into an eerie, cozy setting flooded with sepia tones, flickering candlelight, and, at times, legitimately chilling ghostly glimpses. This tangible mood almost carries the film on its own.
Even moments where plot logic falters or performances waver are softened by the palpable atmosphere. Langley’s cinematography often recalls classic horror films, making the antique shop not just a backdrop but an immersive character, filled with shadows and secrets.
The Oval Portrait is a mixed bag. Its allure lies in its comfortable, haunted aesthetic and the visual nods to Hollywood’s gothic past. Yet, its slow pace, uneven acting, and patchy storytelling make for a viewing experience that will delight some genre fans while frustrating others.
This is a film best suited for those who appreciate slow-burning atmospheres and old-fashioned romantic tragedy fused with supernatural hints. Those seeking tight scripting or intense thrills might find it disappointing.
Despite its flaws, The Oval Portrait surprisingly enchants with its charm. It’s a reminder that sometimes lingering in a place full of ghosts and memories, even if just for 100 minutes, can be strangely comforting and haunting all at once.
