Review: You Should Have Left is the rare horror film that makes sense – San Francisco Chronicle

Kevin Bacon, with Avery Tiiu Essex, is a reserved and slightly paranoid husband of a younger actress in You Should Have Left. Photo: Blumhouse Productions

You Should Have Left is a compact horror film that clocks in at a little over 90 minutes, and yet it has a feeling of expanse about it. By the time its over, theres a sense that weve really been somewhere, that weve taken a Twilight Zone-type journey into a dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mind.

The latest from Blumhouse Productions, available on video on demand starting Friday, June 19, was written and directed by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Panic Room), and its a rare horror film that makes more sense the more you think about it.

Its the story of a family that goes for a brief holiday in Wales. They enter with their surface tensions and their suppressed inner turmoil, and gradually everything is blasted open and revealed.

Kevin Bacon is Theo, the much older husband of Susanna, a Hollywood actress, played by Amanda Seyfried. Hes reserved and seems a bit paranoid, or perhaps insecure. Whatever his issues may be, there seems to be something roiling him, something inside that is disrupting his pleasure at being a wealthy man with a loving wife and child. The movie tells us that he tends to be jealous, but that doesnt seem to be the real problem. Rather, its the hint of some larger problem.

You Should Have Left is a well-acted movie, and part of the credit has to go to Koepp, simply for giving his actors something to play with. As a good screenwriter, he is able to suggest depths without enunciating them. By watching Bacon and Seyfried together, we understand that this marriage is still alive; that the wife regards her husbands doubts and emotional frailties with a combination of tenderness and impatience; and that the husband lives in a state of repressed fear, close to panic, which he doesnt acknowledge and which his wife almost doesnt see.

Early in the movie, the family decides to spend some time in Wales before the wife starts shooting a film in the United Kingdom. The house looks even bigger inside than outside, and thisis a fact of more than symbolic significance. Its hard to pinpoint exactly how the house functions, but it seems to take on contours of its visitors unconscious minds. Thus, it stands to reason that the exterior that which we can know and see should be smaller than the interior, which contains the known and the vast unknown, as well.

One of the particular virtues of You Should Have Left is that, unlike most horror films, the characters relationships with each other remain important. Theyre not incidental to their individual relationships with whatever macabre or supernatural presence is menacing them. Theyre the essential elements.

Also unlike most horror movies, it provides a lot to talk about afterward. Its more than an adrenaline rush. There are ideas here. It would reveal too much to be explicit about what some of these ideas are; suffice it to say that Koepp is concerned here with the way the past exerts a pull on the present; about matters of conscience, and about the ultimate impossibility of hiding from oneself.

Its low-key in tone and not a splatter fest, even remotely. You Should Have Left is horror for a thinking audience.

MYou Should Have Left: Horror. Starring Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried. Directed by David Koepp. (R. 92 minutes.) Available on video on demand starting Friday, June 19.

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Review: You Should Have Left is the rare horror film that makes sense - San Francisco Chronicle

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero