You Should Have Left
starring Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried and Avery Essex
written and directed by David Koepp
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Based on the book of the same name by Daniel Kehlmann (2017), You Should Have Left is a psychological horror. Wanting to get away from their hectic California life, the Conroy family from Los Angeles rents an isolated house in the Welsh countryside. From the outside, it’s a modern looking home on a hill, miles and miles from the nearest town, where the family must drive to purchase all their supplies. At night, the illuminated house atop the dark hill looks really spooky. But what’s really spooky about it comes when the father, Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon) discovers that the house is larger on inside than on the outside. Immediately, I know there’s something devilishly sinister about the house.
The house turns out to be like an M.C. Escher print - an impossible object, a special type of visual illusion created with irregular perspectives that are impossible in nature. It might be interesting to look at an Escher print like that. But inhabiting a house like that in three-dimensional space is like discovering a portal to hell.
It turns out that once entering the house, leaving becomes difficult. Theo becomes aware of some essence, or being inhabiting the building. Someone warns him by writing “You should leave. Go now.” in his journal after he goes to sleep. There is both special and temporal distortion in the house. Theo discovers room, after room, after room. Too many rooms to be contained within the walls of the home as seen from the outside. He sleeps unusually long hours, and mistakes the length of time in slumber.
Theo deeply and genuinely loves his wife and young daughter. In the end, he sacrifices himself to the house in order to allow his wife and daughter to leave. In another odd twist, it turns out that Theo himself is the essence occupying the house, warning himself to leave, and demonstrating the time warping nature of the structure.
The local grocer described the house, saying some people don’t leave it. The film finishes with Theo caught in the house in a situation that’s a cross between Kafka’s Castle, and an Escher print.