Evil House: “You Should Have Left” slickly made and well-acted but not startling or satisfying

You Should Have Left (2020)

93 min.

Release Date: June 18, 2020 (On Demand & Digital)

Reuniting writer-director David Koepp (2015’s “Mortdecai”) and star Kevin Bacon after 1999’s genuinely chilling supernatural horror-drama “Stir of Echoes" (which admittedly deserved more appreciation than it received), “You Should Have Left” makes for a rather disappointing follow-up. While it is an adaptation of Daniel Kehlmann’s 2017 novella, this domestic psychological horror-drama plays like a Stephen King-centric mishmash of “The Shining,” “1408,” and “Secret Window” (which Koepp also wrote and directed). Lurking inside the haunted-house trappings is something with more thematic substance than most, an ambitious and thoughtful film about accountability for sins of the past, and yet, the screenplay ends up being too literal and never as compelling as the cool house the characters should have left. “You Should Have Left” practically invites bad review puns and too-easy warnings to audiences with its title, but rather than being a complete wash for Blumhouse Productions, it’s just a slickly packaged, been-there-done-that-better non-event.

Kevin Bacon is in fine form and earns unexpected sympathy as Theo Conroy, a wealthy, retired Los Angeles banker plagued by nightmares and anxieties stemming from a dark past in which his first wife drowned in their bathtub. Though he was acquitted for having no involvement in her death, Theo is not held so highly in the public eye. Since then, he remarried the much-younger Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), an actress who makes her husband uncomfortable and jealous when filming sex scenes on set, and their marriage is blessed with an adorable 6-year-old daughter named Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex). To get away before Susanna begins shooting a new film in London, they rent out a mid-century modern “sanctuary” in the Welsh countryside. The house is peaceful and sleekly designed, but after the first night, Theo begins losing time, discovers new doors and hallways that weren’t there the first time, and cannot seem to figure out the numerous light switches. Even stranger, Theo takes out a measuring tape to realize the living room is five feet longer inside than it is outside, and who exactly is leaving him handwritten warnings to get out of Dodge? 

Not everything is as it seems in “You Should Have Left,” and that is certainly a relief considering the premise sounds extremely ho-hum on paper. For nearly the first hour, the film works as a reasonably involving drama with a strain placed on Theo's marital and familial dynamics once the inscrutable architecture of the house keeps changing. Even some of David Koepp’s dialogue manages to zing. The twenty-plus-year age gap between Theo and Susanna—and, of course, Bacon and Seyfried—is actually an interesting sticking point built into the story, too; in the first scene where we meet them as a couple, Susanna calls her husband “Old Man” and then later, when Theo goes to visit Susanna on set, the PA assumes he is her father. Thereafter, the crux of the story becomes the mystery of whether or not everything the guilt-ridden and insecure Theo experiences in the rental home is just in his fragile mind, hence his keeping of a journal and frequent listening to a meditation audio book. This is all pretty intriguing, until it's not.

If one is hoping for effective frights or even fleeting thrills along the way, “You Should Have Left” is pretty vacant of both. While memory serves that “Stir of Echoes” had jolts galore, director David Koepp’s use of them then felt assured and visceral. Here, nightmare-within-nightmare sequences and tropes like shadowy figures passing by the frame just don’t cut it, feeling more perfunctory than startling. Acting beside Kevin Bacon and a strong, if underserved, Amanda Seyfried, newcomer Avery Tiiu Essex might be the best find. She is very engaging as Ella, a child character who doesn’t speak like a precocious, sharp-tongued screenwriter (despite her one amusing curse word) but naturally talks and acts her age, questioning her “Baba” about death. Not for lack of trying with solid performances, elegantly moody lensing, and some nifty production design out of an M.C. Escher painting, “You Should Have Left” frustratingly adds up to little. It's a good-looking, well-performed horror film without the meaningful or satisfying impact that it strives to make.

Grade: C