Mark Reviews Movies: YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 17, 2020

There's a fascinating and slightly subversive character study kicking around in You Should Have Left. There's also a story involving a particularly clever haunted house waiting there, too. We get both of those tales in writer/director David Koepp's movie. It's just that the filmmaker forgets to include a reason for connecting them.

They're connected, obviously, by superficial elements, namely that the troubled and troublesome character of the first half is the one who's left to explore the weird and mysterious house during the second half. The house, while certainly giving the protagonist plenty of anxiety and frights, never really feels like a natural extension of the character's faults and sins. The edifice plays a game with his mind and/or body. He definitely deserves it, but this house's game-playing feels as if it's aimed more at the audience than the character.

The man in question is Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon), a former banker who's still inordinately wealthy. He lives in a fine mansion with his wife Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), an actress who's much younger than him, and their 6-year-old daughter Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex). Despite the ideal surface of the man's life, he's struggling with demons of insecurity and jealousy. After all, while trying to visit Susanna at the shoot of her latest movie, Theo is mistaken for her father, so he has to stand off to the side while his wife repeatedly fakes orgasms for sex scene.

Pretty quickly, the movie, adapted from Daniel Kehlmann's novel, establishes Theo as a man who's quietly resentful of everything he's not. Susanna spends a lot of time on her phone (The buzzing interrupts his narrated meditation session), laughing at text messages from a director whom, she suspects, just wants to see her naked. When he has sex with his wife after the day of shooting the scene, he comes up a bit, well, short in continuing as long as she wants. Ella even asks—more as a rhetorical query—if her father is going to die before her mother. "Not if I can help it," Theo mumbles under his breath—a statement that gives Susanna pause for reasons that eventually become uncomfortably clear.

It's a long-standing complaint, which has become a joke, that on-screen couples are often mismatched in terms of age, as is the case here. There's some acknowledgment of the fact that Bacon's character is married to a woman who's played by an actress who is three decades the star's junior. The mismatch is built into the story, and the fact that Seyfried's character is an actress lends a little satirical jabbing at the long-standing trend.

Mostly, though, the story is about Theo and his aggrieved, passive-aggressive ways. He schedules a vacation for the family before Susanna spends two months in London for shooting, and it's in a manor built on a hill in the Welsh countryside. When Susanna notices that she has trouble finding a cell signal in the house, we almost wonder if Theo planned the trip in such a way.

At this point, we should discuss the house, because it becomes the real star of the movie's second half. It's of spare, modern design—all bricks and long hallways (The choice to have the cinematography match the house's sleek and polished look doesn't help in terms of creating atmosphere). It appears smaller on the outside, and there's a sequence later in the story when Theo compares measurements of the living room from the interior and the exterior—finding an inexplicable five-foot difference. The angles don't align, either, in a way that's physically impossible.

There's a lot of business involving this house, as Theo wanders around at night trying to turn off lights that keep shining in rooms that seem to go on forever (He unknowingly spends almost five hours trying to dim the place), finding a secret stairwell that leads to a hidden dungeon, and having visions of past and present family members dying. There's a mysterious figure with a crutch who haunts Theo's nightmares (The movie opens with a dream within someone else's dream, which is at least a slight variation on a cheap trick), and the good news is that, while the identity of this person is obvious from the beginning, the movie offers so much misdirection that we forget the significance of that telegraphed twist by the time Koepp reveals it for real.

As involving as the early study of Theo's many faults and as clever as the house may be, the movie ultimately feels like a long con—of what's real and what's imagined, of whether or not Theo is honest about an accusation from his past, of what the actual deal is with this house. Koepp doesn't so much dangle clues throughout the tale as he provides plenty of odd sights and occurrences, hoping that the blatant but vague explanation at the end will tie up all the loose ends. You Should Have Left may answer the majority of its most pertinent questions, but it doesn't provide us the motivation to care about interrogating the assorted mysteries.

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