‘Stay With Me’ Digs Into Painful Loss with Dangerous Claws

“You go somewhere else sometimes,” Ben says after he cooks dinner for him and Miles. “I can never tell what you’re thinking. It’s hot.”

This shy admission is an extension of their new flirtation. You know that moment in a relationship where you are having fun getting to know someone–before you know what demons they have lurking in their closet, under their bed, or literally on their skin. Do ghosts ever leave us? Or do we need to physically remove their sticky grasp from our psyches in order to heal and move on? Kristen Laffey’s Stay With Me is more than a horror film as it desperately posits if we can run away from our past relationships and survive or whether they imprint on us until we shake them loose.

Ben and Miles’ eyes flicker on each other with anticipatory lust and affection. They have been on a few dates already, but someone cooking you dinner in your own home is on another level–is there anything sexier than someone standing at your friend door with a bag full of ingredients? No, there’s not. In the post-meal chatter, Ben mentions that he picked up a few tricks from his ex-boyfriend who was a chef, and he immediately regrets bringing up his former relationship. When Ben carefully admits that he really likes Miles, the light from a small lamp in the background flutters and briefly snatches Miles’ attention.

As their date continues its steady pace, jagged flashes of violence permeate Miles’ mind, and he sees a spectral figure in the kitchen before he turns on the lights. Laffey’s film is not necessarily a haunting as much as we learn that it is a story of a traumatic inhabitation of the body, mind, and spirit. Could there be something living inside Miles’ apartment that would rather not welcome in a handsome new beau that knows how to make themselves comfortable in Miles’ kitchen and his pants? When Ben is welcomed into Miles’ bed, something horrific is unleashed, and while the entity is unforgiving, there is something dangerously pleading about it as well. Could it be that we could all succumb to something too familiar and strangely, unspeakably linked our heart?

We can see how anyone could fall for Devin Way’s Miles. We sense how tender his heart has become as he desperately wants to move on from a trauma that he doesn’t want to define his life. Nate Richardson, who also wrote the screenplay, tows the line between not wanting to rush too quickly while not ignoring that innocent hunger inside him. To be a fly on the wall on previous dates between these two would probably makes us all blush.

Laffey plays with physical light to great effect. During their date, candles are lit all around this pair like little drops of old-fashioned illumination as a larger chandelier hangs over them. Light streams through the kitchen window and gives the space a green, ghostly hue before Miles switches on the lights. When a truth is revealed at the film’s end, that same green feels is imprinted on Way’s skin–his shoulders and arms glistening with the presence of a dangerous relationship’s past. When the electric lights on Miles’ bedroom walls provide an intimate glow, we notice that the walls are actually painted a blood-red crimson.

Can we escape the physical damage a lover has inflicted upon us? Will it ever go away or does it always make us look over your shoulder? Stay With Me makes your heart race like a lover’s whisper or a terrifyingly strained scream.

Stay With Me streams as part of Out On Film’s online programming in the Queer Fear shorts block.