Review: You Should Have Left Prizes Narrative Efficiency Over Personality

David Koepp’s You Should Have Left has a promising setup for a supernatural thriller. Theo (Kevin Bacon) is a successful man with a troubled history who’s plagued by nightmares of a man stalking his young daughter, Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex), in an ostensibly haunted home. You may assume that his L.A. mansion is the home in question, until Theo pushes for a vacation with Ella and his wife, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), to Wales, where they rent a house that’s at odds with the rustic countryside. The residence looks new, nearly untouched, and is awesomely, eerily huge for three people, with hallways that seem to sprout out of nowhere. This setting refutes the gothic clichés that dominate even contemporary haunted house films, and Koepp shrewdly emphasizes its stifling symmetrical perfection with crisp, un-showy compositions that invite us to parse the frames for potential horrors.

The mysterious Wales estate also informs a subtext that Koepp doesn’t quite bring to fruition: that Theo, a retired banker, and Susanna, a successful actress, are walling themselves off with their money, renting a ludicrously massive house that’s at odds with their stated desires for intimacy and reflects their mounting estrangement from one another. Koepp introduces the tensions between Theo and Susanna with an auto-critical scene. Before the vacation, Theo visits Susanna on the set of a film while she’s heard shooting a sex scene in a car. She later apologizes to him for the awkwardness of the visit, saying that the director insisted on nudity, and is probably a perv who wanted to see her naked. Koepp then cuts to Susanna and Theo in a car having sex, implying that he, himself, is a “perv,” while illustrating Theo’s sense of being threatened by Susanna’s youth. (Many references are made to their age difference, even by Ella.) These scenes are promisingly playful, and suggest that Koepp is intent on rooting the film’s horror in the contours of this relationship, physicalizing the couple’s growing distance with the foreboding modernist architecture of the Wales estate.

Koepp, though, doesn’t follow through on this premise. As the film progresses, Theo and Susanna speak in neat thesis statements that reflect Koepp’s day job as one of the most successful modern Hollywood screenwriters. Here, as in other films he’s written for himself to direct, particularly Secret Window, Koepp prizes narrative efficiency over poetry and personality. Theo’s anger and jealousy are discussed but barely dramatized, as is Susanna’s performative way of “handling” his various misgivings. And Ella is the standard-issue cute, eerie child who essentially only speaks or moves when she’s required to push the plot forward. (The unruly, self-absorbed eccentricity of young children, which is at odds with the expository necessities of formulaic plotting, is almost never accurately rendered in mainstream cinema.)

Slowly, You Should Have Left even abandons the implicative horror of the geometrically irrational setting for tropes that are too familiar to other Blumhouse productions. The entity terrorizing the family takes pictures of them while they sleep, which has nothing to do with the film’s resolution, apart from suggesting the haunted analog equipment from the Sinister films. There’s a dank basement that brings to mind a few settings from the Insidious series, while possible ghosts flick by, barely perceptible, for easy jump scares that recall too many horror movies to recount. And the classics of the genre are also evoked: For one, the unstable husband and daylight horror of You Should Have Left links it to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (there’s even a rotting woman in a tub for good measure).

What You Should Have Left lacks—and what The Shining and even portions of James Wan’s Insidious and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister possess—is a sense of mounting chaos and insanity. Koepp competently goes through the narrative motions, connecting all the dots, and Bacon classes the production up with an admirable feat of underacting. But there’s nothing truly at stake in the film. In short, Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.