Thrillers unfolding in isolation allow low-budget filmmakers to use limited locations to their advantage, as well as prioritize interpersonal drama over action and bombast. But Leave the World Behind, writer-director Sam Esmail’s adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s acclaimed 2020 novel of the same name, is determined to have it both ways, telling the story of a group of people seeking refuge, unbeknownst to them, at the end of the world, but telling it with a starry cast, a few big effects-driven sequences, and even a lot of big camera movements.
Leave the World Behind opens with misanthropic advertising executive Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts) selling her media studies professor husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), on the impromptu Long Island getaway that she’s already booked. Beginning with an “as you know,” she explains how Clay and their kids (Farrah Mackenzie and Charlie Evans) could stand to get out of the city. Her cadence is stiff and her words are much too wordy to feel natural exactly, which is more or less of a piece with how everyone speaks in the film, and it helps to summon an aura of doubt as the world seemingly crumbles around the characters.
The house that the family rents is impressive, as underlined by the pointlessly ostentatious swooping camera moves that introduce us to the woodsy retreat. The place is so impressive, in fact, that Amanda can scarcely hide her disbelief that its owner, G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), is a Black man when he abruptly shows up in the middle of the night with his adult daughter, Ruth (Myha’la), in tow. This isn’t the most peculiar thing to happen to the Sandfords on their getaway thus far, as they ran for their lives at the beach earlier in the day after a massive oil tanker ran aground on a nearby beach, but in spite of communication lines being down, Amanda is luridly suspicious of G.H.’s story of having fled the city in the wake of a blackout.
Amanda’s thinly veiled racism initially drives Leave the World Behind. Ruth doesn’t mince words around Amanda, but she and her father nonetheless agree to sleep in the guest quarters in the basement until they all figure out what’s going on. G.H. seems to know more than he lets on, and he would like the people upstairs to leave. It’s his house after all, right? Initially it seems like much will come down to the prickly dynamic between everyone and Amanda, but she mellows out over time, after which everyone seems to follow suit by keeping their emotions in check, even when signs start pointing to some of them having already been touched by tragedy.
Once there’s no fear that Amanda’s prejudices are liable to turn a bad situation into a dangerous one, Leave the World Behind loses its edge and gives itself over to over-signaling. Turns out, everyone here is exactly who they appear to be on the surface, and the same, it turns out, is true of the film’s big mystery. We’re never left to wonder for long what might be going on, as convenient bursts of news break through the media blackout for the audience’s benefit. Esmail’s film is constantly deflating the tension and mystery that it builds up, such as the initially strange behavior exhibited by a bunch of conspicuously CGI-ed deer. Only one sequence involving a pile-up of self-driving cars manages to leave an impression.
A handful of monologues mark Leave the World Behind as a film with ideas on its mind, like how disaster brings out the worst in us. But if that observation feels trite here, it’s because the film, unlike M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, doesn’t care to really make us feel uncomfortable. A late-film appearance by Kevin Bacon as a doomsday prepper effectively courts disaster, only for the moment to end up underscoring how smoothly G.H. and the Sandfords set their differences aside. In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.
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Oops you missed the point.
Maybe watch it a second time with a different head on.
Subtle, complex and a great ending.
This is proper adventurous challenging film making, beautifully shot and acted.
Do yourself a favour, give it a second go.
Someone has a different view so they missed the point…
It couldn’t possibly be that the movie was garbage.
Disagree. I much appreciated the stylized camera angles and pans. it adds to the disorienting confusion that a disaster creates for the human psyche. Much about losing our direction when calamities happen. we realize only then how technology has made us so methodical without knowing what to do when we don’t have access to our devices. We essentially have forgotten how to think in a crisis. But what I found more interesting are elements in the real world that may mimic the storyline as we have seen in Wag The Dog. The enormity of life depicting art is a scary notion especially one who teeter totters on believing conspiracy theories. While this movie is fiction, we should shake in trepidation of the ideas that surface in the film. I mean we have already been forced to isolate, the middle east is a disaster zone both politically and figuratively and it continues, and stabilization of financial markets have been everything but in the last decade and a half. We should at the very least acknowledge the theme that in a crumbling world we can not escape. Even the best bunker we will have you curious on what is going on outside only to find dead birds and whole hell of a lot of radiation. Terrifying should the world have less control and manipulation than we thought if then left to our own devices. I enjoyed this film.
The 2 ultimate Slant ‘replies’ there. Seriously, I don’t know why you guys bother when that’s your audience, but I’m glad you do.
Someone said on twitter or wherever it’s a smart movie for dumb people. Not sure it is even that. Except for the scene with self-driving cars, everything else in this movie is so tedious. It’s like a two-hour Instagram reel.
somehow worse than Don’t Look Up.
The self driving cars thing isn’t smart, as I understand it they require GPS to navigate the roads, which the world established had been knocked out.
Then the mother drives straight toward the cars risking the lives of her family, instead of just pulling over to the side of the road. It’s a fake tension scene.