‘You Should Have Left’ good advice for viewers of limp horror tale
Kevin Bacon’s Theo Conroy is introduced, like everything else in writer-director David Koepp’s adaption of a Daniel Kehlmann novel, with bits of information that are reluctantly and gradually doled out until we get to an all too predictable The End.
Who is Theo? He’s rich, scandal-plagued and decades older than his wife Susanna (Amanda Seyfried).
“You Should Have Left” begins with the couple’s adorable, 6-year-old blond daughter Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) having a terrible nightmare. But wait! Isn’t that nightmare actually Theo’s?
Theo, we learn, is listening to meditation tapes, writing in a journal, trying to get past a horrible, as yet unexplained, scandal that leaves him plagued with disturbing — and disturbingly vivid — nightmares.
In these introductory scenes we might as well be in another movie, a domestic melodrama about a famous film actress — Susanna — and her frustrated hubby who has no job and who is, as Koepp repeatedly emphasizes with shots of a bare-chested middle-aged Bacon, getting old.
When Theo comes to visit Susanna on her film set he’s asked, “You’re her dad?”
“I’m her husband,” he replies. Yet he’s still left behind a barrier, forced to listen to his wife’s lusty vocals during a sex scene.
Yet “You Should Have Left” has little to do with this marital mess, as interesting as it might be.
The family quickly decamps to Wales for a family holiday before Susanna will spend two months abroad filming. They have rented a huge, nearly empty “furnished” house online and it is here that the story begins to focus.
Here, in a remote location everyone’s nightmares get worse. The villagers — we see just two of them — are Cassandras, implicitly warning of impending doom.
As the couple stress out, shadows dart about, the house strangely expands and Theo finds that someone has written in his journal, in large capital letters: “You should leave. GO NOW.”
It’s safe to reveal that they do not follow these words of wisdom and the film sputters around with final revelations that were pretty predictable once we began.
If “You Should Have Left” is a pale Stephen King wannabe, at least Bacon and Seyfried add intensity and spark through its often ridiculous plotting.
The strangest aspect is diminutive Essex, who has such poise, classic looks and an easy ability with language that she seems not quite human. An alien or robotic child perhaps. But that’s for another, better movie.
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Source:bostonherald.com
