You Should Have Left (2020)

I've said it before and I'll say it again, good horror speaks tome something important in our culture. You Should Have Left, from screenwriter turned director David Koepp explores the theme of privilege wrapped up in a very traditional scary story. Kevin Bacon plays the man to whom "everything came too easy" reckoning with the realization of what that does to him.

Buried in this fairly typical haunted house story, is something far more interesting, the story of coming to understand how just by taking advantage of all ones advantages, one does harm, and coming to the place where one can address that. It is an interesting concept in 2020. It's basically a white cis straight man coming face to face with how just being who he is, or just living as all that the world gives him for that, has brought about pain to others. It is about facing that and the the horror of that realization. But perhaps the most profound, the willingness to accept responsibility, the scariest part of all.

Bacon pulls this off. He's an underrated actor and his performance here is up to snuff to make this more than it is, something that can resonate and make you think. Koepp's film stick very clearly in a very traditional  genre place, probably for a reason, and it doesn't  go beyond that. Sometimes I think I wanted it to be a bit stronger in its form but for what it is it does it's job. I personally didn't find the horror parts very scary (although the allegory parts are spot on) and I wished it had managed to be that like similar recent films like Us and The Invisible Man. But it has the traditional genre kind of jump scares that most audiences scream at so maybe others will find it scarier than I did.

Still, the film is a little surprising in how it offers us something more than it appears.

You Should Have Left
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried
Writer/Director: David Koepp