On a hill in Wales there lives a house. Legends tell of this particular house and the many houses that existed before it, going back immeasurably through time. It’s a place where right angles can’t explain the walls and a dark, sinister world seemingly hides just beyond a door that shouldn’t be there. A place highlighted in Polaroids mysteriously dotting the walls. Where time doesn’t quite behave as it should.

In this house something bad has happened. Will happen. Is always happening.

Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon) is a rich man with a past. Don’t they always have a past in films like You Should Have Left? He is often filled with indescribable rage and jealousy. But he’s working on it. He started a program, you see, through an app. It offers him meditational and motivational speeches and recommends he journals every day. Nothing too stressful. Just write down in one word how he’s feeling.

(Tired. Confused. Pissed.)

Susanna (Amanda Seyfried) is his much, much younger wife...to the point where he gets asked whether he’s her father when he goes to her sets. She’s an actress trying to navigate her way through extraneous sex scenes on camera, but offers to give it all up so she can live on Theo’s seemingly endless wealth. Together they have a precocious six-year-old named Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex), who is both inquisitive and acts older than her age suggests. The kind of girl who asks her father point blank, “Daddy, because you’re old, you’ll die before mommy?”

Theo is jealous (I said he’s working on it!) and wants to keep his wife and child all to himself. So when Susanna has a week break in before filming her next picture in the UK, they decide to book an opulent home in Wales through an Airbnb-type site. It’s gorgeous and modern, but looks a bit detached and cold...which seems to suit Theo just fine.

The first night in the house, Theo tries turning out the lights in the house only to discover that certain switches don’t seem to want to cooperate and the lit hallways lead him to a Polaroid of a woman in a dilapidated place, standing in shadows. By the time he gets back to his wife, she’s fallen asleep and five hours have passed in the blink of an eye. And as he continues to work on his anger and his journaling, he discovers someone...or something...has been writing in his book.

Telling him to leave before it’s too late.

In 1999 a little movie called Stir of Echoes had the horrendous luck of coming out almost a month after a slightly larger movie called The Sixth Sense. Stir of Echoes, written and directed by David Koepp and starring Kevin Bacon, was an excellent little chiller with some fantastic performances and surprises. I, and a lot of horror fans, preferred it to the more mainstream and twisty M. Night debut, so to say I was excited to hear about the pair reteaming for this Blumhouse shocker is an understatement.

Unfortunately, the mediocre script, slightly adapted from Daniel Kehlmann’s short novella, really hampers any sort of escalating tension in the first two acts. Like in the Kubrick’s The Shining’s version of Jack, Theo is a patronizing, controlling and verbally abusive husband from the beginning.

He’s instantly jealous and insecure about his very young wife, who is always texting someone. Her phone becomes the Overlook’s typewriter...tap tap tap...tick tick ticking away at Theo’s patience and sanity. He pries into her phone, computer and iPad while she takes a bath, looking for something--anything--to validate his fears. This marriage was already on a collision course before the house came along to nudge them along.

Daughter Ella, meanwhile, is used as a prop. She’s introduced in Theo’s nightmare of a man with a thudding cane who wants to take her away from him. She quickly becomes the bargaining chip to escalate any sort of tension. A way for Susanna to unload the biggest and most inappropriate exposition dump I have seen, to let the audience, through Ella, in on Theo’s previous, dead wife and the way the public believes Theo murdered her.

It’s...a choice.

The house itself feels ripped from the pages of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, as it is seemingly bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. Doors randomly appear to cart people off to other places in the house...or worse, to a Silent Hill-esqe world of decay and concrete, where spilled Polaroids seemingly tell the future and the past. It’s here where You Should Have Left is at its strongest, as it transitions to a slightly trippy third act that pits the house against Theo. As the clunky dialogue gives way to more horror tropes and action, the movie finally finds its slippery footing.

Amanda and Avery do the best with their slight roles. Avery imbues Ella with a precociousness that feels real most of the time. A scene where she rides through the kitchen on a scooter (again, bringing to mind another old soul child named Danny) and knocks over a glass of water, immediately freaking out and apologizing feels painfully realized. For all of her easygoing and adult behaviors (she pats her father’s hand at one point in a kind of, been there, dad nonchalance), the way she closes up when something potentially aggravating happens speaks to a child who’s afraid of her father. It’s a subtle moment, but one that speaks volumes.

Amanda, meanwhile, doesn’t have enough to sink her teeth in. Her role is basically to be a foil for Kevin’s character because, let’s not beat around the bacon, this is about him. His failings as a parent. As a partner. As a human. And while the script doesn’t give him the best dialogue to react with, he gives it his wild-eyed all. When You Should Have Left dispatches its pretenses and truly digs into the father/daughter relationship, it hits its stride and becomes more thematically interesting.

That said, it’s all relatively toothless, even though it’s competently filmed. Angus Hudson’s cinematography delights when he’s finally allowed to explore the maze-like nature of the house. Some shots are expertly crafted, such as a spiral staircase illuminated by a single light bulb that sways back and forth, casting disorienting shadows of the railings against the wall. Or the way a shadow will move in the periphery; a trick that never fails to startle me...or at least make me smile. And a brief foray into the Welsh countryside provides an almost Twin Peaks-like surreal experience with a grocer who talks in riddles, offers a set square to help and picks up groceries...one by one.

Ultimately, You Should Have Left is “fine.” It’s just such a far cry from the duo’s fantastic Stir of Echoes and feels like a retread of other, more interesting works.