This movie, "You Should Have Left," includes a writer and director David Koepp - known for writing classics such as "Jurassic Park", "Carlitose Way" and "Mission Impossible 1".
And "Spider-Man" 2002 and "Indiana Jones 4" - with American star Kevin Becken, after their strange movie Stir of Echoes in 1999, which was destroyed by "Sixth Sense" that year, although the first was released more than a month later.
Coyp loves ghost stories, especially when the viewer gets confused, so he doesn't know if there is a real ghost in the story or are she the delusions of the movie's hero. This is the fourth film in the same direction as this director, after the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, "The Secret Window" and "Ghost Town".
Theo (Becken) is a rich man and a former banker who hides a secret from the past. Married to Susanna (Amanda Sayfred), an actress younger than 20 years old. Because of their age difference, and because of porn scenes in Susanna's movies, suspicion manipulates Theo's mind, he knows all her passwords and searches her smartphone
Her tablet and laptop are a secret, so he may find signs or traces of betrayal. The third player in this drama is their daughter Ella (Avery Essex).
Susanna's next movie requires her in London, Theo proposes to take advantage of the break between her ending and next movie for a family vacation in Britain. The family rents a huge house in the county of Wales. Theo says, "The home from the inside is bigger than the outside." Of course, the phrase was written by Cuyp as a reference to the series "Doctor Who".
There are unnatural things related to distance and time within the country house. On the first night, before they go to sleep at 10:30, Theo goes on a tour of the tangled corridors of the house as a maze to turn off the lights, when he returns to his wife he finds her in a deep sleep, and he wakes her up saying: "I can't believe you slept so fast." Then he goes to sleep and we see the hour next to him indicating 3:30, meaning that the corridors of the house are located in another time zone.
Then Theo discovers the secret of Susanna that she has a second secret phone, and the strange and illogical is that she put it in an open place! If it had been a secret, she would have kept it in her coat pocket, or a far place Theo would not expect. The point is that his discovery of her second phone proved that his suspicion is valid.
They quarrel and Susanna takes the car overnight, leaving Theo and their daughter in the strange house. Things take a strange and bad turn, and when Theo decides to carry his daughter and escape from the house and goes out walking to the nearest village four miles away, he finds himself after a long walk exactly in front of the entrance to the front house and sees a person covered in black standing looking at them from the bottom window before he disappears. Theo enters the house because he is certain that it is inevitable, and as soon as he crosses the doorstep, a frenzy begins and wrestles with demons believed to have kidnapped his daughter. Koepp is a professional writer who knows where and how to surprise, and this is from our experience in his previous films, but here he neglected the most important principle for any writer of any story, which is that his start is strong compared to an ordinary end.
There are clear metaphors like the sun from Stanley Kubrick's "Sparkle" 1980, and his second unhappy part, Doctor Sleep 2019, and a metaphor from the Quip "Stare of Echoes" mentioned in the first paragraph. The last moments in the movie are the weakest, for example, the movie has a strong start, as the presence of two time zones at home is a very strange and frightening idea, as are the presence of corridors and rooms that were not present at the beginning of their residence and appear during the exploration of Theo House, it is also a good idea even if it is not new.
These all give the viewer a sense of clostruvipa (fear of tight or crowded places), even though the house is huge. But theo’s going crazy does not add much, as the viewer knows this, but is waiting for a solution. For an experienced viewer, i.e. who has watched horror movies with the number of head hairs, he will expect all the episodes of a frenzy, which means that Koip did not write them well or tolerated them. He will also expect many strange phenomena that have been repeated in other horror films from light, which returns to work on his own, after Theo turns him off and closes the door of the room, to the mirror whose reflection does not move. If Koip, whose text was quoted from a short story by German Daniel Keelman, would have placed a better end and deepened further into Theo's back story, the secret of the hero's past would have had a greater impact on the story. Revealing the secret in the last scene has no value at all and has no effect because it is expected, and it is not considered even a surprise, otherwise what caused the frenzy and feelings of guilt! This is not Bekin's first horror movie. He was preceded by "Freddie 13", "Tremors" and "Flatliners", so he can enjoy the features of an ordinary street man, such as Tom Hanks, and this helps in sympathy for his character, though in the eyes of this writer he can also play a role Evil, as we saw in the Hollow Man in 2000.
Becken and Seifried lack the element of harmony and this weakens the dynamic relationship between them, especially the moment theo discovered her secret phone that passed without a trace. Essex, in return, performs well and basically films of this genre are not without children to give the hero or heroine a reason to take care of him.
This movie is produced by Jason Balam, and all films leaving his factory focus on the elements of horror
Shocks are more than logic and logical correlation of events.
In general the movie is incomprehensible, and it can be put on a list called: "Movies You Don't Try to Understand" with David Lench's Lost Highway, and the truth is that the ends of the two films are very similar, and also on the same list is Inherent Vice's film "Inherent Vice" by Paul Thomas Anderson, despite My film Lynch and Anderson are technically higher than this movie.
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The viewer gets confused, and he does not know whether there is a real ghost in the story or the delusions of the movie's hero.
In general, the movie is incomprehensible, and it can be put on a list called: "Movies You Don't Try To Understand."
The movie has a strong start, as having two time zones at home is a very strange and frightening idea.