In short: You Should Have Left (2020)

Warning: there will be spoilers for those readers named David Koepp or those who have never seen a movie before!

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Because of tensions in their marriage, the married couple of Theo (Kevin Bacon) and Susanna (Amanda Seyfried) are trying to work out some of it by taking their little daughter Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) for a couple of weeks in a rented house in Wales, before successful actress Susanna has to pop off to London for a shoot. Those tension are mostly pretty much what you’d expect: he has anger issues and feels hurt in his manliness by the age difference (which I am apparently bound by law to call “icky” these days, but most certainly won’t), while she is as shallow as she is cute. Also an actress with all the cliché stuff this brings in lazy scriptwriting land (plus cheating on him, as it will turn out, because of course she is). Theo’s anger issues have a somewhat deeper dimension because he was once accused of having killed his first wife but was acquitted in court, and we all know that nobody acquitted of a crime in a movie ever was innocent (unless it’s a courtroom drama).

They have chosen a pretty bad place for their attempt at playing happy family, and soon a lot of mildly spooky stuff happens. You pretty much know the rest.

Which is of course the main problem of David Koepp’s movie: you have seen all of this before, often in visually much more inventive manner, and written with actual verve and insight instead of Koepp’s strictly mechanical interpretation here. And sure, if you simply go by the mechanics, there’s nothing exactly wrong with the way Koepp approaches this story here, but the mechanics of a script are only ever the point in film school.

On this side of the screen, it’s rather more problematic for the psychologically based horror film this is supposed to be how flat and trite the characterisation is. Despite Bacon and Seyfried both being perfectly capable of inhabiting more lively characters, everything about them here is absolutely obvious and simply not terribly interesting, the film never finding a way to explain why exactly one should care about the marriage problems of these cardboard cut-outs. The so-called reveals about the couple the film gets up to in the final act have been bleedingly obvious from the first couple of scenes, and the film’s practically delusional insistence it’s a surprise to the audience that Theo is indeed responsible for the death of his first wife borders on the absurd. None of the plot developments surprise; worse, none of them put anything about the characters into a new or more complex light. It’s just clockwork mechanics pretending to be a movie.


To be fair, there are a couple of decent moments of weirdness in the last third of the film, using irrational shift of space and time to produce hopes of the film going somewhere more interesting for its end, but that fizzles out pretty quickly. Eventually, everything ends exactly as you expected it to end right from the start, without insight, without strangeness, and with an idea of guilt and punishment that’s as old-testament as it is simple-minded and deeply unsatisfying.

Three Films Make A Post: In a world of temptation, obsession is the deadliest desire.

Warm Bodies (2013): I suspect Shaun of the Dead will always be the best romantic comedy with zombies, so it is outright decent of Jonathan Levine’s teen romantic comedy with zombies (or rather the book it is based on) to not at all try and compete with that classic but rather to do its own thing. It’s a generally inventive, usually funny and often cute film, with a likeable romantic couple in Teresa Palmer (alive) and Nicholas Hoult (dead). It is a pretty enjoyable movie, but it’s not really made with the horror fan at heart, so if you can’t help yourself, you might be turned off by the only very mild gore, the too pat and friendly ending and the film’s general niceness.

Twisted Nightmare (1987): Being too nice is probably nothing anyone will blame Paul Hunt’s slasher for. It’s the usual thing about a bunch of attractive young things gathering in a cabin in the woods and getting struck down. Atypical for slashers of the time (and of today, really) the film features three(!) victims that aren’t white. That’s of course not terribly important in the long run, because everyone’s meat for the usual ritualistic killings anyway. These are decent but not spectacular but do run through the whole of the film instead of the last twenty minutes, which is not something all cheap-o slashers have to offer. The script even contains one or two ideas that make it possible for it to have more than one “finding the bodies” sequence and plays around with who its final girl may or may not be. There’s also a potential supernatural angle involved, lots of nudity, and the whole she-bang was apparently shot on the same set as the third Friday the 13th (though that film is certainly better shot and directed).

That’s certainly not the worst you can get out of a late 80s slasher.

Secret Window (2004): David Koepp’s Stephen King adaptation is certainly one of the decent ones, mostly living off the – sometimes rather more showy than the director knows what to do with – central performance by Johnny Depp and the sort of slick look money can buy a production even when it otherwise lacks much of an aesthetic identity of its own. It’s not terribly deep either, never quite digging into the meat of the novella (one of King’s best as far as I’m concerned) it is based on, or displaying anything but a Hollywood screenwriter’s idea of human psychology, but is coasting on Koepp’s – again very slick – rather emotionally distanced conventional thriller stylings. Curiously enough, the film goes for a darker ending than that of the not exactly chipper novella, yet still has a lesser impact than the story did, perhaps because Koepp misses out on fleshing out the other characters (as played by an underused Maria Bello and Timothy Hutton) enough to convince me the film actually cares about what happens to them.


It certainly is still a well-made, entertaining film but I never felt myself getting emotionally involved.