The Stay
2025 · 9m
Directed by Frazer Lee
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
A young woman checking into a secluded holiday cottage discovers a broken black mirror and a dark secret that stays with her forever.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The broken mirror premise is competent haunted-house material, but it doesn't subvert enough—it leans on the exact supernatural imagery everyone expects, and the 'stays with her forever' resolution is textbook slow-burn horror without the bite that would make it genuinely unsettling.
Lee demonstrates solid command of gothic atmosphere and the formal grammar of isolation horror, building dread through careful compositional choices and restraint; there's a lineage here—Polanski's spatial unease, that particular British gothic sensibility—executed with craft-aware precision.
The decision to anchor the entire film on the *reflection* rather than the space itself—making the mirror the actual antagonist instead of the cottage—is the move that transforms this from generic haunted-space into something precise and strange, especially in how it collapses psychology and the supernatural into a single image.
Festivals
- Spooktacular Film Fest for Horror & Sci-Fi 2025, Official Selection