Butler's Cinema Scene

Kevin Bacon, Avery Essex

“YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT” My rating: C+ (Amazon Priime)

93 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Written and directed by David Koepp and starring Kevin Bacon, 1999’s  “Stir of Echoes” was a ghost story that stuck with you.  Twenty years away from my only viewing of that movie, I still get goosebumps thinking about it.

Koepp and Bacon reteam for “You Should Have Left,”  a haunted house yarn that, alas, has nothing like that staying power.

The setup is  familiar: Family seeks to leave their troubles behind by pulling up roots and renting a house where weird things start happening.

The backstory provided by Koepp’s screenplay offers plenty of familial woes percolating beneath a seemingly placid exterior.

Financial guru Theo (Bacon) has a pretty trophy wife, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), who is a couple of decades his junior. They live in Hollywood where she is an actress.

They have an adorable daughter, Ella (Avery Essex), who loves her Daddy something fierce.

Daddy, though, has issues.  For one, he’s sensitive about being so much older than his wife (people want to know if he’s Susanna’s father). He’s having a hard time handling his simmering jealousy, especially when he visits a movie set on the same day Susanna has to perform an intimate romantic scene with another actor.

Moreover, Theo is still trying to live down the scandal surrounding the death of his first wife, who drowned in the bathtub in a drug haze. To this day  lots of folks think Theo murdered her.

So you can hardly blame him for hauling the family off to the UK where the couple have rented a big place in the Welsh countryside.  It’s a very modern, austere home built on the foundations of an old farmhouse where bad things may have happened…at least according to the vaguely threatening locals.

Amanda Seyfried, Kevin Bacon

The house provides a disconcerting environment.  For example, rooms are much bigger on the inside than they are from the outside. Theo has dreams (or are they?) of endless hallways and dank subterranean passages. Doors appear, then vanish.

Theo’s relationship with Susanna becomes strained. He discovers disturbing scribblings in his therapy journal: “You should have left. Now it’s too late.”

And when little Ella goes missing — he can hear her calling through the walls — the anxiety kicks into high gear.

Despite at least one great shock effect, this latest effort from the Blumhouse horror franchise is fairly tepid stuff. The creepiness factor is OK, but the payoff is pretty weak.

For all that, the performances are good.  Bacon nails it as a man losing it, Seyfried walks the tightrope between faithful wife and adulteress (which is she?) and little Miss Essex turns out to be a fine young actress…she reminds of the young Fanning sisters.

| Robert W. Butler