Michael Tully’s Brilliant Don’t Leave Home–Reviewed and Explained

It’s well over halfway through the year and claims about the best horror films of 2018 are gaining more legitimacy, so I feel on firm ground when I say that Michael Tully’s Irish horror film Don’t Leave Home will be in my top ten this year. It is directed and written by Tully, shot on location at beautiful Killadoon House in Celbridge, County Kildare, Ireland, and features stellar performances by its three leads—Anna Margaret Hollyman as Melanie Thomas, Lalor Roddy as Father Alistair Burke, and Helena Bereen as Shelly. Don’t Leave Home is eerie horror. It builds dread and has moments of jarring creepiness. It veers into non-narrativity at times, as resonant images fade and dissolve into each other. It is beautiful. It makes you think: I watched it and then had to watch it again, and I’m still not sure I understand it—not in a frustrating way but in a way that makes you realize there’s simply more to be understood. Don’t Leave Home will stay with me.

Here is the trailer:

Don’t Leave Home opens in 1986 with a priest, Father Alistair Burke, painting a young girl praying by a statue of the Virgin Mary. Later, the girl disappears—as does her image from the painting. In the present, American artist Melanie Thomas has become obsessed not only with Siobhan Callahan’s disappearance but with a whole string of unexplained disappearances in Ireland over a thirty-year period. To capture the mystery of these vanishings, Melanie creates dioramas of the incidents. As she says, “I started to think it was part of something much bigger than we could begin to understand, and I thought the best way to capture that sense of mystery was through the uncanny scale and nature of dioramas.” After a scathing review of her dioramas appears in an Irish newspaper, Melanie gets a call from a woman inviting her to come to Ireland and meet Alistair Burke, take a commission from him, and allow him to set up an auction for her diorama of the Callahan disappearance. Melanie goes and is plunged into the strange world of Burke, the woman who keeps house (and appears to keep Burke), and their silent and enigmatic servant Padraigh (David McSavage).

In the pagan iconography of Burke’s house, the scene in which Melanie’s diorama is auctioned off (so she thinks), which is much more akin to a cult gathering than an auction, and in the power of the landscape—the woods—around the house, Don’t Leave Home evokes late 1960s and early 1970s folk horror, such as The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). And it also traces its lineage to the paranoid horror of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), as Melanie gets increasingly unnerved by what’s happening around her and finally demands to leave. Of course she is persuaded to stay one more fateful night. At least one critic has mentioned Jordan Peele’s Get Out (itself influenced by Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) in relation to Don’t Leave Home –and the connection is more than incidental.

Don’t Leave Home is different from all of its progenitors, though, in that it puts art front and center: the power and moral implications of art drives the narrative. Indeed, the centering of art evokes another of my favorite horror films of the year, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, in which another artist, Annie Graham (Toni Collette), attempts to make sense of her own uncanny life by crafting dollhouses. It is Father Burke’s painting of Siobhan Callahan that begins the film, that initiates the first disappearance we see, and the connection of painting to the vanishing of characters continues throughout the film. How Father Burke makes his subjects disappear, why he does so, and the profound implications of his “art” for his conscience form the central subject of the film. These questions are bound up, moreover, with religion. Burke says early on, to Melanie, that he had to choose between painting or God. And he chose painting—but the divine and the demonic do not leave his life just because he chose art. (And here I’m reminded of 2015’s The Devil’s Candy, which also explores the link between art and the demonic.)

Don’t Leave Home is simply a beautiful film; the score is brilliant and perfectly highlights the themes of the film (art, religion and folk horror). The actors deliver standout performances and, most importantly, Don’t Leave Home takes up some important questions—the role of art, nature, and religion in our lives—without offering any simple answers. You should watch this film (twice).

Grade: A

Don’t Leave Home is distributed by Cranked Up Films and is available to stream on Amazon.

You can also now get it on DVD from Good Deed Entertainment:

Don’t Leave Home explained – Spoilers

If you’ve watched the film and want to think more about what it means, here’s what I think (or here’s one thing I think). I don’t pretend to have the film entirely worked out and I’m looking forward to reading other takes on it.

In his fantastic book, The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the late Mark Fisher argued that the  “eerie” clings to landscapes that are “partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?” he asks. And he continues that “the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (p. 11). Don’t Leave Home perfectly embodies Fisher’s conception of the eerie. Tully’s film lingers on landscapes which are unnaturally “emptied of the human” and it asks, “what happened to produce this disappearance?” Tully explores agency too, and in answer to the questions—What kind of agent is acting here? What effected the disappearances?—I think he answers, “art.”

What seems to make people disappear—both Siobhan Callahan early in the film and Melanie herself later on—is that they were painted by Alistair Burke. Burke’s painting embodies what Melanie calls an “evil miracle”: Burke paints someone and then he is able to make both the image and the person disappear. After Melanie is banished in the cult-like ritual that she thinks is an auction of her diorama, she finds herself alone in a vast natural landscape, along with the other subjects of Burke’s art. Burke himself has become consumed with guilt about his “miracles,” even as Shelly tries to tell him that the people he’s made disappear have gone to “heaven.” But Burke isn’t so sure. And when we see Melanie and Siobhan in this “heaven,” we’re not sure either. Finally, Burke paints himself and thus banishes himself, refusing to perform any more “miracles” for his devotees.

So what does all this say about art? I think Don’t Leave Home offers a powerful message about how art, in the way that it abstracts people and rips them from nature, effectively “kills” them in this world. This is exactly what Edgar Allan Poe wrote about in one of his criminally underrated short stories, “The Oval Portrait.” In that story, an artist is painting his wife. Obsessed with his art, with what’s on the canvas, he only realizes when the picture is finished that his wife is dead. His unremitting focus on his art “killed” the real subject of it. I think this is a big part of what Don’t Leave Home is about.

But not all art is fatal—and in one of the more enigmatic parts of the film, Melanie shapes a dark figure out of mud and this allows her to return from her banishment to the real world. Art can be about this world, about nature—and, in this connection, it can bind people rather than detach them.

Anyway, I would LOVE to hear more thoughts on this film from any viewers out there.