You Should Have Left
You Should Have Left is the most House of Leaves movie on this list. So much so that if you Google “House of Leaves movie” right now, it’ll be the first actual result you’ll see. However, it is also the worst movie on this list, so approach with caution.
Kevin Bacon stars as a retired banker who books a family holiday in Wales, but the vacation home they’ve chosen turns out to be extremely strange. Time isn’t flowing as it should, and there’s an anomaly in the angles between the walls and the floors; the house is larger on the inside than on the outside. Try as they might, they can’t escape the house once they’ve settled in, and Theo seems to be trapped there. If all this sounds a bit familiar, you might naturally imagine that German writer Daniel Kehlmann, on whose novella this movie is based, may have picked up House of Leaves at some point.
Synedoche, New York
If your favorite part of House of Leaves is how it layers stories and forces you to question the reliability of their narrators, then Synedoche, New York is the one for you. Featuring an incredible performance by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and directed by notable surrealist Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) the movie follows a theater director called Caden Cotard (Hoffman) who creates a huge replica of New York inside a warehouse, but whose commitment to the project’s realism starts to blur the lines between fantasy and reality.
The labyrinthine stage soon expands beyond Caden’s control, and it’s not long before it starts to mirror the way his own life and relationships are unraveling. Like House of Leaves, the environment becomes an extension of human consciousness, reflecting the impossibility of fully understanding or containing your own existence.
Skinamarink
Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink divided audiences back in 2022. Ostensibly following two kids who wake up one night to find their father missing, the movie spends about 100 minutes exploring what happens when their home’s objects, doors, and windows start vanishing as well. However, the movie’s slow, experimental nature is the root of the problem for some viewers, even as it delights others.
House of Leaves fans who yearn to be hypnotized by both a malleable sense of time and spaces that don’t make sense could still find Skinamarink just the ticket, but they should also be aware going in that the movie isn’t structured in a way that can ever be truly understood, blending analog horror with a pervasive, unsettling nightmare logic that you can’t help but respect.