A Shining Successor

T here’s a lot of creepy stuff in the Kevin Bacon chiller You Should Have Left: doubles, nightmares, hidden passages, a Welshman. At one point — shudder — the film even suggests a family might be stuck at a vacation house without a cell signal, but some things are too horrible to contemplate, so let’s just let that drop.

Marketed under the Blumhouse banner that has come to stand for gore and cheap thrills, You Should Have Left is instead an almost violence-free psychological thriller about rich people with internal traumas. While it isn’t terribly original and remixes lots of familiar horror elements, Bacon and writer–director David Koepp make it work fairly well, if not as well as the pair’s previous foray into horror, the massively underrated 1999 film Stir of Echoes. That one was a twisty and frightening experience, whereas the new film, which was intended for theaters but is instead being given a virtual release via video on demand, is merely competent.

Bacon plays Theo Conroy, a rich banker with a shadowy past who is now married to a movie star, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), with whom he has a six-year-old daughter named Ella (Avery Essex). He has been on edge, and Susanna has a shoot coming up in London, so they agree to take some time off in Wales, at a beautiful Scandinavian-contemporary farmhouse in the fields. Apparently, the location was the most intriguing offering at hell’s Airbnb. The house is gorgeous, vast, and, possibly, not as clean in its soul as it is in its lines. At the local greengrocer’s, the Welsh citizen who runs the place asks Theo, “Anything happen yet?” Which is probably not what you want to hear on your first day in a new house, especially from an ornery Welshman. The grocer offers Theo a friendly gift of a protractor and the advice to check out the right angles in the house, about which there is something not quite right.

With its isolated single location, its spooky antiseptic corridors, its bathtub of doom, a gallery of guest photographs, a dad coming apart at the seams and a single cute child, You Should Have Left could have been called The Shining Goes to Wales. (Maybe that was overdue since it has already gone to Scotland.) It doesn’t have nearly the impact of The Shining, but what does? Koepp’s pacing is swift, and he makes the most of his star. Bacon became a highly adept actor over the years, and he expertly plays Theo’s haggard self-examination as more and more things start not to add up in the mystery house of shadows.

Koepp, one of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible, etc.) hasn’t had nearly as much success as a director — Secret Window, back in 2004, was his only hit. This film comes in at a tight 90 minutes, but that’s because the secrets it reveals in the last act emerge with relative simplicity. They don’t have a lot of layers, and Koepp doesn’t invest them with much weight. He might have done well to make this film even more like The Shining, by slowing things down, adding a few complications and giving its supernatural elements some room to come out and play. Instead, the film sticks to the tried and true. When the really wild stuff happens, just assume it’s a dream, and you won’t often be wrong. Relying on dreams for its scariest scenes, though, makes the film feel thin.

Koepp’s favorite shading is to set everything up as a balance of doubles and shadows, with characters possibly dealing with their own dual natures and even a house coming down with a bad case of split personality. Objects cast ominous shadows, dream selves influence waking lives and objects in mirrors are weirder than they at first appear. The detail that has the most impact, as well as the most originality, doesn’t deliver a conventional scare but it’s still the most disquieting one in the movie, especially for married people, and it revolves around dual technology — an idea that Koepp could have expanded on or indeed built an entire contemporary horror story around. If there’s a great horror movie that fully exploits the ramifications of our scary fixation on all things gadgety and electronic, I haven’t seen it yet. You could call it iScream or maybe The Poisoned Apple.