Amidst the winter influx of star vehicles churned out by the Hollywood machine arrives a Christmas jewel in the rough – Sam Esmail’s Leave The World Behind, now streaming on Netflix. This crisply unnerving apocalyptic drama may rely on a familiar genre, yet deftly skewers today’s cultural unease with a wit as sly as it is stinging.
We open on New Yorkers Amanda and Clay Sandford, played with polish by Julia Roberts and bookish charm by Ethan Hawke, as they motor away from the bustle of Brooklyn deep into the verdant wilds of Long Island. Cinematographer Tod Campbell’s lilting aerial shots establish a tone between pastoral romance and jaded suburbia before we settle into the couple’s sumptuous vacation rental. She and her English professor husband have fled for respite, seeking to “leave the world behind” even briefly with their two teenage children.
The isolation they crave is quickly disrupted. After witnessing a disturbing incident on a beach, which goes unremarked by the family, there’s soon a knock at the door. Mahershala Ali’s dapper G.H. and his daughter Ruth have arrived, claiming ownership of the house. Brilliant light plays across Ali’s creased brow as he explains that an unprecedented blackout has struck New York. The two families size each other up: Amanda’s barefaced hostility meets G.H.’s unflappable dignity. Their prickly convergence sets up tensions primed to detonate as ominous events encroach from outside.
Here Esmail skillfully turns the screws of paranoia and dread as strange phenomena accrue – phones fail, televisions fuzz out – which he captures with off-kilter camera angles and a driving score by Mac Quayle. Shots follow the characters at harsh removes as though some unseen entity is tracking them. The true menace always lurks off-screen.
Yet sadly, as the normalcy ruptures, the film struggles to stick to its high-concept landing. My family audience dropped away, and expectations turned to frustration, so I finished the viewing alone. A token assortment of half-sketched doomsday scenarios are tossed out disconnectedly. Rogue artificial intelligence, climate collapse, international conflict, domestic terrorism: take your pick. As a viewer, I also needed to immerse myself in the protagonists’ unravelling psychology. But both characters and this mildly disengaged critic need to be grounded more within any clear framework where dramatic stakes can emerge.
Some glimmers of resonance arrive in the themes of race and class bubbling under the surface. Sheltered white liberalism rubs against G.H.’s wary preparedness, a black man accustomed to disaster’s uneven blows. Amanda toggles between obtuse privilege and dawning guilt in her interactions with his daughter Ruth, played with quiet dignity by Myha’la Herrold, in scenes that feel carefully observed. But it feels like a missed opportunity, the film ultimately declining to confront America’s festering divisions seriously even as it gestures toward them.
As the assemblies of disquieting omens accrue into blaring alarm bells, expectations rise for a hammer blow of a twist that will tie the strands together and launch us breathless into the third act. Instead, the revelations land with all the gravitas of an unwanted Christmas gift, provoking not chilled awe but an exhausted “Is that it?”
The human drama that should crescendo alongside the realisation of doom fades away. Amanda scrutinises news reports and squabbles half-heartedly with her family, but the crackling, tightly-coiled Roberts of the film’s first half is gone. Character development stalls out and we lose our connection to care what fate befalls any of them.
The most arresting sequences in Leave The World Behind come from its non-human cast members. Rose is intrigued, if not a little unsettled, by stray deer appearing on the garden edge and staring knowingly at the still-confused humans. The eerie sight echoes Hitchcock’s ominous amassing of crows in The Birds. The deer scene perplexes me with both its quiet intensity and obscure meaning. I expected panic, yet Rose remained oddly composed, given the anomaly before her. Her flat affect communicates a kind of willful blindness. Evidence of the world’s unravelling multiplies before her eyes, yet she suppresses the reality testing such uncanny events would prompt in the average viewer.
Reading the symbolism is equally tricky. Are the deer a warning about climate disruption accelerating far faster than models predicted? Or do they represent America’s expertly orchestrated anxiety at societal collapse, media-stoked fears run amok? The scene frustrates interpretation. But in the family’s non-reaction, absorbed in banal travel games, we discern society’s determination to ignore dire warnings until the end. It captures our culture’s disturbing capacity for the normalisation of crises.
In the film’s most terrifying scene, a self-driving Tesla speeds towards the family with vicious autonomous intent. It communicates the latent sense the innovations we’ve welcomed into our homes could just as quickly turn weapons against us. It also echoes anxieties about AI transcending human control to destroy its makers.
The autonomous car scene, expertly shot and edited for maximum fright, provides an acute warning of our surrender to non-human forces. Like pampered house pets turning feral once domestic supply lines fail, the film implies we’ve bred the seeds of our destruction into the consumer culture we’ve taken for granted. The objects that constitute modern security can liquidate it just as quickly. It distils the nerve-fraying sense that 21st-century life rests on a precarious foundation we desperately ignore. As a viewer, I was left with a queasy foreboding.
As the nerve-fraying weekend in the country unfolds, Rose seeks comfort in the nostalgic landmark of ’90s sitcom Friends. For Rose, the series represents a fantasy of human connection purified for easy consumption, while real-life relations require too much effort to process.
Yet as the social scaffolding of normalcy dissolves, Rose discovers to her distress that Netflix has suspended service. Suddenly forced to engage with the roiling reality around her, withdrawal proves impossible. This underscores the film’s biting diagnosis of today’s reality-averse youth culture. When societal collapse can’t be filtered out by technology, it elicits utter disorientation and eventual denial.
No one proves more joltingly disconnected than Amanda, whose dawning recognition of crisis doesn’t penetrate her protective carapace of cynicism.
“I f***ing hate people,” she blithely declares early on, incarnating modern misanthropy.
Amanda illustrates that self-interest, not compassion, could prevail when the going gets tough.
Yet Rose’s reliance on escapist comforts to screen out communal bonds doesn’t spring from nowhere. Leave The World Behind suggests she inherits it from parents too preoccupied with work and self to nurture her self-reliance. Although the character is least inclined to self-absorption, Clay’s thoughtful gravity can’t overcome family dysfunction. The film reveals how contemporary dystopia-weariness transmits down generations like an undiagnosed genetic defect.
In its final stretches, Leave The World Behind cruises on the charisma of its leads without offering them anything substantive to dig into. Thematically muddled, it forgoes emotional truth for a propulsive flashiness that increasingly rings hollow. There are glimmers of the smart, gripping movie it could have been, which only highlight the missed potential.
Ultimately, the film has little to say about human connections under pressure or how we might support each other through turmoil. We cling to the comforting fictions of heroic disaster blockbusters, where individual bravery and sacrifice redeem collapse. We fail to adequately reckon with the horrors such scenarios may wreak on our collective behaviours. Yet survival in an unrecognisable world could prove a curse, not a triumph.
Leave The World Behind misses the opportunity to explore questions about the kind of culture we have built. But with a last-minute swerve toward an over-tidy ending, it withholds any comforting answers.
