Some films lure you in with their premise alone, whispering promises of something deeply human wrapped in something otherworldly. ‘You Should Leave Before Me’, written and directed by brothers Boyd Anderson and J. Markus Anderson, is one of those films. On paper, it sounds like an emotionally heavy drama. A longtime couple coping with tragedy by guiding the newly dead into the afterlife.

But it turns out to be a bit more than just that. It is visually inventive, ambitious and thematically rich. Right from the start, we meet Mark and Joshua, who have been partners for nearly three decades. They seem to be on some rough patch with their relationship, and that’s evident in how they bicker over simple things like coffee and couches. The kind of friction that you would expect to see between people who have spent so much of their lives together. You can tell immediately that their relationship has so much history, and the interaction between them gives enough away. You get that they love each other, but you don’t quite feel it in those first exchanges, and that matters later.

Where the film begins to pulse with life is when the premise finally kicks in. Doors appear where they shouldn’t. Closets open onto makeshift forests. Strangers show up at odd angles and in stranger moods, needing to be shepherded into whatever comes after. This is where the film’s creativity shines the most. Cardboard landscapes, cluttered rooms of unspoken memories, and people carrying unresolved heartbreak like luggage. It’s an absurdist patchwork of grief, humour, memory, and metaphor. And even when it wobbles, there’s no denying it’s trying something fresh.

Shane P. Allen plays Mark and he holds the film’s emotional core with a quiet, uneasy grace. His grief isn’t loud. It sits in his shoulders, in his hesitation, in the way he sometimes can’t look at Joshua too long. On the other hand, John Wilcox, who plays Joshua, brings a more playful, animated energy that balances the heavier emotional currents. Together, they feel lived-in, even when the dialogue doesn’t give them much to breathe through. Their performances carry the intimacy that the script occasionally forgets to showcase.

The encounters with the dead swing between moving, eccentric, and outright chaotic. A grieving woman surrounded by delicate china. A former soldier dripping with hatred. A wild intruder who shatters through ceilings like someone kicked down a door in Mark’s subconscious. Each encounter says something about regret, denial, lingering attachments, or unfinished stories. But how cleanly these threads tie back to Mark and Joshua varies. Sometimes it’s poetic. Other times, it’s more spectacle than substance.

Tonally, the film is unapologetically odd. It borrows from the anything-goes spirit of modern multiverse storytelling, mixing sincerity with surreal humour. At its best, it blends the ridiculous and the heartbreaking in the same breath. At its messiest, it risks feeling like scattered sketches rather than a cohesive journey. The writing tends to tell you what to feel instead of letting you arrive there yourself, and that can dull the emotional impact. The film doesn’t always trust the audience to sit with ambiguity, and you can feel it explaining itself in moments that should have been left to breathe.

The runtime is one of the film’s biggest obstacles. 120 minutes clearly is too much for anyone to handle, especially for a story like this. Perhaps a tighter, leaner version of this story that would land harder without losing what makes it unique. Some sequences exist more for the novelty than the narrative, and you feel the drag in the middle stretch.

But what you can’t deny is the sincerity and invention running through it. Without a doubt, the directors threw everything at the narrative visually. From art direction, visual effects and cinematography, you can see the deliberate attempts at executing this film’s concept. As imaginative as it was, the execution of all the visual elements sits right there with it. But all of that doesn’t save the viewer from getting lost in the complexities of the narrative. The fantastical world it serves up simply isn’t for everyone and might only resonate with a few. But for viewers who appreciate risk, metaphor, and messy attempts at meaning, there’s something here worth sitting with, and that is something worth appreciating.

Rating: 3.5/5