You Should Have Left. David Koepp. 2020.
A retired banker and his much younger actress wife book a vacation with their daughter in a remote holiday home in the Welsh countryside. I came across a clip of this online the other day and it really intrigued me. I looked it up and came across some other plot points that sounded fascinating.
Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried play the seemingly happily married couple Theo and Susanna who admittedly have a few issues they want to iron out, so with Susanna due to start filming a movie in London they decide to find somewhere in the country to get away from everything for a bit and focus on these little niggles in their marriage. The place they find is a horrid modernist glass and brick monstrosity, apparently a real house in mid Wales called Life House.
I don't want to say too much of what happens but sadly You Should Have Left is disappointingly derivative. Stealing ideas from other better movies and failing to develop any of them or truly mesh it together, as if just slapping creepy ideas at the screen one after another is enough.
The film most reminds me of the far superior The Witch in the Window. There's also a bit of say Identity, the John Cusack film by James Mangold. Basically ideas pinched from all over. There's also some opportunities woefully overlooked to play more on the location, the rural village down the road with its passive aggressive locals and so on. I wonder if perhaps the film would have worked better with lesser names in the cast instead of A-listers Bacon and Seyfried.
Plus points there are some genuinely eerie moments and it all looks quite pretty, oh and its quite short. That's about it really. I'll keep it in my collection but I'm glad I only paid ?7.99 and frankly would only recommend streaming it on something or paying 2 or 3 quid in Cex.
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Last edited by J Harker; 7th July 2024 at 07:44 PM.
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