Movie Review ‘You Should Have Left’: Kevin Bacon in Top Form

There’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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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There’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.