Leave the World Behind
Sam Esmail, the writer/director of “Leave the World Behind” and creator of “Mr. Robot,” knows how to do a post apocalyptic story. There’s the snobby family stuck in an earth shaking event. “I f*cking hate people,” says Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts), jadedly peering out of her luxe Brooklyn apartment window. And so Amanda and her nice guy husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) take their kids Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) to a fancy mansion in Long Island for the weekend. Like other disaster movies, this one snakes through quirky characters, takes interest in society’s collapse, and plays up tension between different people forced to survive with each other. But “Leave the World Behind” struggles where it counts: creating real stakes to go along with all that upheaval.
Post apocalyptic movies have become something of a holiday tradition on Netflix, the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas corridor has been home to “Don’t Look Up,” “White Noise,” “Bird Box.” While there are some surface level similarities between those films from McKay and Baumbach and Alam’s book all four are about upper middle class white people thrown into chaos you feel De Jarnatt’s DNA more in Esmail’s film.
Like De Jarnatt’s LA-set romantic thriller, “Leave the World Behind” is a conspiracy theory comes to life. At first, it’s small things while on vacation the Sandford lose their cell service then it becomes big things. A rogue cargo ship crashes ashore near their beach chairs; by nightfall they hear a knock at their door when nobody should be walking around outside, owner G.H. Scott (a charming Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) have suddenly returned after years away due to a city wide blackout afflicting New York. Amanda, in her natural racist state, believes these people are the actual owners. She also doesn’t believe there’s a blackout, even though apart from a national emergency advisory that just played on every channel the televisions in the house have stopped working. But G.H.’s got his own theory. The events are starting to line up with a proposed government plan that would sound crazy if we weren’t living through it right now.
Most of the disaster movie stems from the racial tension between Sandfords and Scotts. This is probably Roberts’ most despicable on screen role. She’s mean and selfish, prioritizing the wants and needs of her white kids over those felt by Ruth, whose mother is missing. The film stops just short of calling Amanda racist it instead gives her a lame backstory to justify her pettiness and also neglects to give any personality to Amanda’s son, relying mostly on a one-note (albeit funny) “Friends” joke to give identity to Amanda’s daughter. But these rudimentary building blocks are enough, in the hands of capable actors, to instill dread throughout much of the movie.
The same can be said about Esmail’s love for wild swinging camera movement. Mileage will vary for many as he and cinematographer Tod Campbell do long pans, ostentatious crane shots and reoriented compositions that show topsy turvy calamities powerless planes and paper fliers falling from the sky; dead bodies washing up on the beach; weaponized self driving Teslas, even Kevin Bacon as a mysterious off the grid figure. With so many contemporary films relying on staid visual language, it’s actually quite wonderful seeing a couple creatives have fun shooting an already absurd premise.
However, there is a larger problem with “Leave the World Behind.” It relies on an idle desire to be a machine for tension. What are the stakes? And how are they actualized? To fully interrogate what this film fails at doing requires spoiling it so please, if you want to go in blind (which I recommend), read no further.
Here we go The greatest weapon a disaster film has is its onscreen death. Deployed correctly, for the right character, it can bring the grander emotional impact of world ending events down onto a personal level. Sometimes it’s a side character usually the best friend of the protagonist (“Volcano,” “Daylight”) sometimes it’s a patriarch or matriarch (“Dante’s Peak,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Twister”) and sometimes, if you really want to go for broke, it’s the hero (“Armageddon,” “Miracle Mile”). But generally, in a good disaster movie, you need a good death that affects the protagonist in such a way that pushes them toward survival, toward empathy, toward humanity. “Leave the World Behind” lacks such a moment. So as the narrative moves through its chapter structure (the film is divided into chapters), stretching on for 141 minutes, storytelling becomes lax and wobbly.
While absorbing particularly in its character-driven motifs and actorly prowess “Leave the World Behind” remains distant, emotionally withholding a human element as if it were a top secret clue rather than an essential key to unlocking the heart.
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