Raindance 2025: If You Should Leave Before Me

Mark (Shane P. Allen) and Joshua (John Wilcox) are a married couple whose loving relationship has come under recent stress due to a tragic event. Despite the fact that a wedge has clearly been driven between them, they choose to focus instead on their work, which is to guide recently deceased souls into the afterlife. However, at some point, the couple is going to be forced to address the elephant in the room…

Written and directed by The Andersons (Boyd and J. Markus), If You Should Leave Before Me (2025) takes its slightly outlandish and episodic premise to investigate the joy, sadness and fragility of existence itself with a warm sense of humour and a naturalistic approach to the many ways we try to cope with death. Only in this case, it’s mostly folks trying to come to terms with their own death, aided and occasionally abetted by Mark and Joshua.

Set in the home of our main characters, the introduction of their unwitting – and often unwilling – customers is innovative, as each new challenge arrives in the shape of a door which appears and then leads them to a very specific area, which is designed according to the life of the person who has passed. For instance, the initial onscreen encounter with a woman called Bonnie takes place in “budget Narnia,” which appears to be both a glimpse into Bonnie’s headspace and a sly comment on the indie constraints the movie is working within.

This fantasy drama possesses the structure of an anthology movie as our intrepid duo find themselves in different stories which require them to discover the essence of their latest subject and overcome fear and obstacles in order to steer them towards the light. As with life itself, some of these assignments are relatively straightforward, but some take far longer than expected and so the normal “there’ll be another segment in fifteen minutes” expectation of that subgenre is subverted. Those side quests overlap, particularly when it comes to an obstructive, homophobic German called Gunter who’s immediately dubbed “Nazi Man” by an annoyed Joshua. I should mention Tom Noga’s work as Gunter, a seemingly dreadful bigot at first glance, but with far more going on under the surface.

The early rifts in both the visuals and the day to day verbal sparring between Mark and Joshua hint strongly at what’s wrong between the two of them and the early reveal of that is welcome, as the resulting fallout pushes the second half of the movie into potentially devastating emotional territory while keeping the framing device intact, causing the pair to confront the issues they’ve been so politely trying to avoid.

The inclusion of a malign presence which attempts to tear our protagonists from their world and into the next gives If You Should Leave Before Me a horror-adjacent edge, but terror fans should temper their expectations accordingly. This is a romantic and comedic tale first and foremost, albeit with a sure grasp on its willingness to hop into unexpected genre territory. The martial arts action sequence is a delight, a deliberately mannered and increasingly bloody scrap that would jar in most circumstances, but fits the “anything goes” ethos of this film perfectly.

In the two central roles, Allen and Wilcox complement each other wonderfully, the former with his measured, reflective methods and the latter’s more effusive, heart on his sleeve approach to life. I began their journey with slight puzzlement at how they ended up together, but the story and performances paint in those crucial details as to what makes a union tick and as the piece moves into its last act my feeling was “Of course they’re together, they’re perfect for each other.”

If You Should Leave Before Me is something of an oddity, of that there’s little doubt, but its peculiarity won me over instantly and the sadness which always lurks in the background, ready to undercut those moments of pure joy, hits hard. This is the point of the review where I will freely admit that I had to pause the screener at just before the hour and a quarter mark to have a cry. At almost two hours on the dot, the pace may occasionally be a tad too leisurely, but The Andersons’ uncommon examination of love and loss is frequently charming, occasionally overwhelming and I loved it.

If You Should Leave Before Me (2025) featured at this year’s Raindance Film Festival on 21st June.