You Should Have Left

By: Maggie Stankiewicz

You Should Have Left depicts the unraveling of a perplexing marriage within the walls of a sterile, hyper-modern and equally confounding house in the picturesque Welsh countryside. Adapted from German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s 2017 novella of the same name, You Should Have Left was brought to the proverbial big screen by director and screenwriter David Koepp whose writing credits far outweigh his directorial ones. Koepp is no stranger to genre filmmaking, penning well-known movies like 2002’s Spider-Man, 2005’s War of the Worlds and the most recent attempt at The Mummy in 2017. His extensive experience dealing with conceptually expansive and otherworldly happenings makes the pitfalls of You Should Have Left all the more surprising. Despite a small but strong cast and extraordinary location, this movie bites off far more than it can chew – making it more of a popcorn film than the high(ish) concept movie it wants to be.

Theo (Kevin Bacon) is a wealthy but troubled man who lucked out and married Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), an actress significantly younger than him. Together they have a precocious and precious young daughter named Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) who is the glue keeping the marriage together (whether Theo and Susanna can see it or not). Theo, riddled with jealousy and insecurity over his past and the glaring age-gap between him and his wife, convinces his family to take a vacation in the Welsh countryside. When they arrive at their rental home things immediately feel…off. Koepp does a good job of capturing the discomfort surrounding Theo, his family and the home. The house is larger on the inside than it appears to be on the outside, but that’s not all.

Staircases, hallways, closets, lights and time itself play tricks on Theo – his mental state aligned with the health of his marriage. The home in You Should Have Left so badly wants to be a character of its own, much like The Overlook in The Shining, but it lacks the texture and depth of the hotel. This lack of depth is thematically constant for this movie as it comes very close to tapping into interesting plots and themes, but never fully commits. The movie acknowledges the two-decades that separate Theo and Susanna without ever diving into the implications – the jealousy, the insecurity or the power dynamics. The movie dabbles with the concept of time’s elasticity without ever really expanding upon its significance.

The more tricks the house plays on Theo the worse his marriage became until finally, like a faulty pressure cooker, the lid blows off. Theo, finding messages around the home that tell him that he should have left, makes another troubling discovery. Susanna is cheating on him. Instead of dealing with that issue, the movie separates Theo and Susanna, leaving him with their daughter Ella. Thankfully, the film raises the emotional stakes for the viewer at this plot point and amplifies the house’s insidious nature. Amanda Seyfried is criminally underutilized in this film, used as more of a prop than the leading lady she deserves to be – reserving the real performances to Kevin Bacon and Avery Essex. Koepp’s history directing Bacon is evident as he pulls a good performance out of the veteran actor, but it’s not good enough to make viewers care about Theo. Instead, audiences will find themselves attached to adorable little Ella – just hoping that she’ll grow up to be only half as messed up as her parents.

As another moderately-low budget Blumhouse production, You Should Have Left delivers on its visual and stylistic elements but fails to accomplish much more than that. While fun and certainly entertaining, this movie will leave genre fans wishing for more. More depth. More scares. More explanation as to how and why the house does what it does to morally ambiguous men and their families. This movie is not Blumhouse’s best production, but it’s certainly not its worst. It might sound like I hate this movie, but I assure you I didn’t. I enjoyed it very much but am mourning the movie it could have been with less rigid direction and more emphasis on its strengths: the actors, the location and the horrors of simply being human.