What Is The Meaning Of You Should Have Left? Kevin Bacon's Movie Title Explained

In June of 2020, while widespread lockdowns were still keeping plenty of moviegoers indoors all day, Universal Pictures scrapped its plans to release the Blumhouse horror movie "You Should Have Left" in theaters and premiered it digitally instead. The film stars Kevin Bacon and Amanda Seyfried as Theo and Susanna, a couple whose marriage seems to be troubled as soon as they're introduced. They decide to vacation in Wales, but the home neither one of them can seem to remember booking starts exhibiting strange, paranormal behavior.

The title "You Should Have Left" comes from a note that Theo discovers in his meditation journal. First, before the title reveal, he finds out that an unseen someone or something wrote the words, "You should leave. Go now," in his meditation journal. Theo, however, discovers that Susanna is cheating on him and stays in the mysterious Welsh house anyway, prompting that same mysterious entity to write a second note reading, "You should have left. Now it's too late."

By the end of "You Should Have Left," viewers find out that the devil uses the Welsh house to collect souls consigned to Hell. Theo, it turns out, watched his previous wife die when he could have helped her, so his stay in the home is his damnation. Furthermore, his soul — somehow traveling backward through space-time via the home's paranormal capabilities — was the one writing those notes. Theo, then, was warning himself to leave in order to prevent his own damnation.

"You Should Have Left" is the second collaboration between Kevin Bacon and director David Koepp. Previously, the two of them worked together on the 1999 horror film "Stir of Echoes," which is based on a novel by author Richard Matheson.

Koepp told Daily Dead that the idea for "You Should Have Left" dates back to him and Bacon wanting to make a horror film about marriage, similar in tone to "Rosemary's Baby." It was Bacon who approached Koepp with the 2016 German novella "You Should Have Left" by author Daniel Kehlmann, proposing that they shape their idea into a literary adaptation. "My initial response, of course, was, 'I don't want your stupid book. I want to tell my story,'" Koepp said. After he read the novella, however, he acquiesced.

The notion that the protagonist — unnamed in its source material — tells his past self that he should have left comes directly from Kehlmann's book, though the manners of communication in the two works differ. While initially, the future version of Kehlmann's narrator leaves a note in a notebook, later on, he communicates the book's title through a baby monitor rather than writing a second note. Otherwise, this aspect of the book translates directly into Koepp's filmed adaptation.