Reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski was one of my most memorable literary experiences. I’ve never been spooked by a book so thoroughly as that one, which tells the story of a haunted house – haunted not in the sense that it contained haunted spirits, but in the sense that the house itself was a living and haunted object (a la The Shining). When previews came out for You Should Have Left, written and directed by David Koepp (screenwriter for Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible, among others), I was immediately intrigued. Kevin Bacon measures a spooky house and finds that it’s 6 feet bigger on the inside than on the outside. Could this be my House of Leaves ripoff in film format, at last?
Not so much.
You Should Have Left examines couple Theo (Bacon) and Susanna (Amanda Seyfried) Conroy, who are exactly as rich-white-upperclass as their name sounds. Susanna is a successfully Hollywood actress playing Seyfried’s actual age, while Theo is a much older man constantly questioning whether someone as young and attractive as Susanna might really want him. In addition to those insecurities, Theo’s also still recovering from the trauma of losing his first wife in an accidental drowning. Though he claims his innocence, even strangers know of Theo for his involvement in the case, in which he was accused but later cleared of her murder.
After an awkward incident on Susanna’s film set, the couple decide to get away from it all for a while. With their daughter in tow, the family flies to Wales and book a modern, sprawling house in the middle of no where for their retreat. As you might expect, things get weird in the house, with Theo’s insecurities coming at him from a multitude of angles.
You Should Have Left is a bland and paint-by-numbers exercise in horror, filled with random and strange quirks that often left me puzzled as to the film’s basic tone and intention. In the first five minutes of the movie, for example, Theo has a dream about his daughter, who is probably 5 or 6 years old. In the dream she gets out of bed when she hears a noise and says, exasperated, “God damnit,” with the cynicism and routine tone of an embittered 70 year old. This moment was downright hilarious to me, but I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be. (It was also my favorite part of the film, which probably tells you everything you need to know).
Later in the film, Susanna laments at the way Hollywood requires actresses to glamorize the sound of orgasms on camera. In the next scene, the couple has sex, complete with Susanna’s exact same performance. Bacon’s character, however, barely makes a move or a noise before Susanna cheerfully declares that he’s finished, too. The strange and meta double standard in the sex performance feels like it’s pretty clever, but is it? The rest of the film feels so half-baked that it’s hard to take these sporadic pieces of comedy or insight at face value.
Without getting spoilery, that tug of war is how I felt about most of the film. It sometimes teetered between almost being funny or clever but ultimately feeling undermined by incompetence, particularly in the back half of the film. For a movie that examines timely topics – the potential toxicity of a relationship between a man and woman half his age, his publicly presumed guilt for a crime of which he’s been declared innocent – I have no idea where this movie stands on a variety of the themes it plays with. For every I-think-that’s-clever-but-is-it? detail, there’s another head-scratcher plot moment. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that Bacon feels wildly out of place in this role, often calmly muttering banal observations under his breath in moments that should otherwise feel terrifying.
You Should Have Left feels like half-baked, non-committal commentary grafted onto a disappointingly generic horror film. It has brief flashes of cleverness or self-awareness that give you hope throughout, but these moments aren’t tangible enough to stop you from wondering if you were giving it too much credit in the first place.