Review #327: You Should Have Left (2020)

2025 Supplemental Review #1 - You Should Have Left (2020)

I watched You Should Have Left because a YouTube Short popped up on my feed showcasing one particular sequence from it (the part where they're measuring the house and it's larger on the inside than the outside) and it instantly piqued my interest. I was surprised I had never heard of this film, but once I gave it an actual watch I kind of get why.

You Should Have Left follows Kevin Bacon as a man who travels with his wife and daughter to a European vacation getaway, to cope with the stress he's been dealing with in the years after he was accused of murdering his previous wife. They vacation in a strange modern house where strange things happen, space and time seem to distort themselves, and ominous warnings foretell struggles with inner demons. Can this family recognize the signs and leave before it's too late?

I'm going to spoil much of the plot of this movie because I don't think it's very good. I feel like the story was trying to combine too many things and none of them really fit the way they were supposed to; either the script suffered from too many rewrites adding and removing things (but not realizing which plot points were load-bearing and which weren't) or this was two different scripts mashed together with only the barest amount of connective tissue- I'm not sure which. 

I went into this expecting a knock-off of House of Leaves, as the sequence that intrigued me in the first place was the spatially-impossible segment where the house is demonstrably larger on the inside than the outside (closely mirroring a similar segment in the aforementioned book). However, beyond that one sequence, there's very little in this movie that resembles House of Leaves- yes the house in this film has some weird spatial stuff (doors appearing and disappearing, hallways that don't seem to lead where they're supposed to) but it all comes right at the end and seems to have little rhyme or reason, instead just serving as an immediate plot device and then being discarded. As a whole this feels less like a House of Leaves adaptation and more like a Scooby-Doo-esque haunted house story, with people going in one door and coming out another while chasing each other around the house. The segment of the characters measuring the house was clearly meant to evoke House of Leaves, but that entire scene could have been removed entirely and nothing in the movie would miss it (as the scene's only purpose was to have Kevin Bacon's character see his daughter go missing in the house), and the only other scene that had anything to do with it was the shop owner telling Kevin Bacon to measure the house's angles (which didn't really make much sense in the first place and only served to lead in to the later measuring scene).

There's also a lot about the mystery of this movie that seems like it wasn't thought through. The house clearly has some weird stuff going on, as evidenced by the fact that it's larger on the inside and some doors and halls appear and disappear. But the weird shadow guy turns out to be Kevin Bacon (or maybe a future version of him? Or some projection of his guilt? idk) so was he causing the evil, or was it the house? If the house is relevant at all, why was his daughter haunted by the shadow man at the start of the film, before they ever even went to the house? That opening scene felt like it was written for a completely different movie, one that would reveal that Kevin Bacon was evil and he'd been dragging all of this darkness along with him. But then, like I said, we get a final product where the house definitely has weird supernatural stuff going on. So I don't know what they were going for.

Also, a couple little minor nitpicks: we see Kevin Bacon leave the "You Should Have Left" note for himself, which I can see a writer thinking "this is going to be so clever, check this out" but it also doesn't really make sense since we don't see him leave the "Now it's too late" note later (and it wouldn't have made sense for him to stick around to do so). Why explain one of the notes and not the other? It would have been a better mystery if that was never explained, but instead they explained it in a way that urges you to forget about the other half of the mystery. Another nitpick is that the subplot involving whether or not Kevin Bacon's character killed his wife feels like a remnant of an earlier script where it really mattered, we see flashes of memory and then one (shockingly brief) moment where it seems he's going to have to confront his inner guilt over her death and then he just dumps the "reveal" that he killed her at the very end without any prompting. Did Amanda Seyfried suspect he killed her? Does she care if he did? I don't know, and that's a big problem.

Speaking of which, my last nitpick is that Amanda Seyfried's character kind of serves almost no purpose in this film? Like, she acts as a source of distrust in Kevin Bacon's character arc but her deception ultimately goes nowhere, and even when he kicks her out of the house it's in a way that feels like their relationship isn't over. It doesn't feel like a real thing someone would do. If he suspects she's being unfaithful, I feel like kicking her out should have held much more finality to it. But she just comes back at the end and practically no words are said. And this lack of depth hinders other parts of the film too- I've never been clear, is Kevin Bacon's daughter also Amanda Seyfried's daughter? Or was she the daughter of the wife that was killed in Bacon's backstory? (It feels strongly like she's meant to be the late wife's daughter but if so, it's very weird that Bacon would just like... give her his daughter at the end.) I appreciate that some lines of dialogue were included to address the fact that Kevin Bacon was like thirty years older than Amanda Seyfried but I feel like their relationship needed SO MUCH more depth than we got. It just feels like another part of this script that was half-baked or was once fully baked, but they cut half of the loaf off and injected the other half with some raw dough and shipped it out.

This movie has a couple interesting sequences but ultimately I feel like the plot just doesn't really work as-is. If it was meant as an homage to House of Leaves they should have leaned into that, and if it wasn't, then just cut that sequence entirely.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Online Rentals from Satan

My Literature Hot Take: I tried reading House of Leaves a few years ago, and hated it. I think I got a third of the way through? Maybe half? I don't remember. I think the story at its core (the Navidson Record) is fascinating and would totally love a book of just that, but all of the story-within-a-story-within-a-story got tiresome, and the accounts of the primary protagonist (if you can call Johnny Truant that) were just constant sex- and drug-filled escapades that I didn't care for one bit. I've heard a billion people tell me how amazing and transcendental that book is, so I think later this year I'm going to give it another try, but I swear I gave it my all and I just couldn't stand the narrative cutting off another chapter of the Navidson Record to give me yet another story about some sex worker the stoner protagonist slept with the night before.