Ever since this pandemic put movie theaters out of commission and studios began putting films usually meant for a theatrical release on VOD, I’ve been wondering if Blumhouse would release their next film. At the forefront of indie horror under Universal’s umbrella and with an ongoing list of upcoming films with no release dates, I had a hunch it wouldn’t be long until one of their films made a big VOD debut. This question was finally answered when Blumhouse dropped a promising trailer for writer/director David Koepp’s next film You Should Have Left. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to the hype.
Based on Daniel Kehlmann’s novel of the same name, it follows a middle-aged man named Theo (Kevin Bacon) who’s haunted by past trauma. His possible involvement in a tragedy that ended his previous marriage has left him guilt-ridden and with unwanted attention from people who don’t believe his side of the story. Thus, in order to get away from the world, he takes his much younger actress wife, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), and their daughter Ella (Avery Essex) to a secluded house in Wales. Upon arriving, they’re intrigued by the house’s unique design and the seemingly endless amount of rooms—but that doesn’t last. The longer they stay, the more Theo starts to realize that the house is not as quaint as it seems and that it contains the trauma he’s been trying to run away from.
As a writer, Koepp has a strong pedigree as part of big blockbusters like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman. As a director, though, his pedigree isn’t as highly regarded. Personally, Premium Rush is heavily underrated and features Michael Shannon completely unleashed in the best way possible, but the rest of his work simply hasn’t hit the same heights. From the trailer, a lot of the suspenseful, strange moments in You Should Have Left got me excited that this film could be kind of turnaround, but it left me woefully disappointed with how unoriginal the scares are.
Moments of suspense like Theo looking another way and his reflection looking back at him, foreboding messages in his journal, zombified corpses that represent people from Theo’s past, and painfully obvious dream sequences are the same kinds of smoke and mirrors typical to the genre that have become tiring to watch. There’s even an incredibly bland harbinger in the store clerk (Colin Blumenau), whose only purpose is to spew a cryptic, unclear history about the house and be a jerk to Theo for some reason.
The entire end sequence is an especially bland story trick we’ve seen time and time again, with some time-jumping that attempts to connect everything so quickly that it almost feels like they were trying to wrap things up as quickly as possible and it makes the film’s biggest revelations about what’s happening to Theo fall flat. Now, none of this is to say that these tropes can’t ever create effectively suspenseful scares, but Koepp only uses them at face value in order to liven up the pace and create an intriguing atmosphere. However, he’s never successful in doing so and rarely relies on the simple setting of this film to create an unsettling atmosphere.
The film’s central location is a real house in Wales called the Life House and it’s actually a pretty rad setting for a horror flick. It’s isolated, the inside is filmed in a way that makes it look huge compared to the outside, and its plainness and emptiness makes it unsettling even without all of the moving shadows and lights that turn off and on all by themselves. Koepp does capture its genuine eeriness well from time to time, but wastes a great setting on lackluster scares and characters.
Seyfried and Essex aren’t really given much to work with, as their characters are given little depth and forced into representing annoying tropes. Susanna is essentially meant to remind us of the age gap between her and Theo, as she’s always on her phone and acts like a total ditz sometimes. Ella isn’t much better, as she’s kind of annoying and only acts as a plot device that brings out more information on Theo when talking to Susanna and as motivation for Theo to run around the house when things take a dark turn. As much as Bacon tries, he also struggles to make Theo’s issues relatable or at least intriguing enough to want to understand what’s happening to him. He does add some charm in the way Theo acts towards Ella and makes his guilt about his past pretty believable, but there’s a very interesting theme about the accusatory nature of our society that’s totally under-valued here and it’s a damn shame.
The film lightly touches on the idea of “cancel culture” and the way past mistakes can ruin a person’s reputation through Theo constantly worrying about how people perceive him, and that Ella will look at him differently if she knows about what happened. This is a very unique perspective and if Koepp did anything with the theme, we could’ve gotten a look at a different side of “cancel culture”. Instead, we get a thin narrative full of possible cheating, unsureness of what’s happening, and realizations that provide answers that viewers could see coming from a mile away. Not to mention, the film’s final act presents SPOILER one of the laziest and most uninteresting versions of, basically, “hell” that I’ve seen and the cherry on top of horror clichés.
You Should Have Left is a cliché-ridden, horror bore that is underwhelming at every turn and wastes golden opportunities to create a modern horror story with simple eeriness. The biggest gut-punch this film really provides is that it’s currently worth twenty dollars to stream and the only thing it will leave you feeling is ripped off.
