Leave The World Behind (2023)

from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/movies/leave-the-world-behind-review.html





From left, Mahershala Ali, Myha’la, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in “Leave the World Behind.”Credit...JoJo Whilden/Netflix


By Alissa Wilkinson
Dec. 7, 2023

The haunting cleverness of Rumaan Alam’s novel “Leave the World Behind” — published in 2020, when every novel about the apocalypse felt uncannily prophetic — comes in what it doesn’t say. For the whole book, you’re expecting to find out what’s caused the catastrophe that is just beginning to reach the main characters, New Yorkers who just happen to be vacationing out in the sticks when things start going wrong. And then, tensions stretched to the breaking point, the book thwarts all expectations, leaving behind a feeling of lingering unease.

The film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by the “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail, also leaves behind lingering unease, but for entirely different reasons. In this rendition of the story, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as Amanda and Clay Sandford, an advertising executive and her English and media studies professor husband, who live a comfortable but not extravagant life in their Brooklyn home. (He says it’s in Sunset Park; she says it’s in Park Slope; that’s a clarifying character detail, if you know the geography.)

Prompted by her annoyance with humanity, Amanda, a prickly misanthrope, rents a house to which she, Clay and their teenagers decamp. They wish, as the listing promised, to “leave the world behind.” (As a New Yorker, I have to pause on this house for a second, because somehow it’s in the woods, only reachable by a multi-hour drive and remote enough that cellular service is extremely spotty, but the Manhattan skyline seems closer from the yard than it does when you’re in, like, Brooklyn Heights. I don’t know.)

Anyhow, the house is beautiful and they’re happy for a few hours until they go to the beach, where something so bizarre happens that I, who am not made of such strong stuff as them apparently, would have headed back to my Sunset Park (Slope) home immediately. Instead they go back to the house and seem to shake it off, for a while — until a man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter (Myha’la) show up on the doorstep, claiming that this is their house, and they’re so sorry, but there’s a blackout in the city and can they please stay here tonight?



It soon becomes clear there’s more than a blackout, but this is where the movie really goes awry. Here is the thing about stories about the apocalypse: What they reveal, most of all, is what we think will actually end the world. What works in the novel is this question is left open, a blank space for the reader to fill with their own conjecture. Thus the reader discovers something about themselves, maybe indulges in a little self-examination, without getting caught up in the plausibility of this particular catastrophe.


You can do that in a movie — Jeff Nichols’s stellar 2011 thriller, “Take Shelter,” comes to mind — but it is a bit trickier to exercise restraint in a visual medium, and requires deft storytelling. Instead of leaving room for imagination, Esmail elects to throw everything at the screen. What will bring the apocalypse? White liberal racism (present in the novel, but underlined in some thuddingly obvious ways here, like when Clay keeps turning the car radio dial and landing on 1619 AM). Class divisions. Also conspiracy theorists and survivalists ranting about microwave weapons. Also our phones, our market fluctuations, our enemies foreign and domestic, self-driving cars, radiation — in essence, a “dysfunctional nation,” populated by people who, like Amanda, don’t really like one another.

So basically, a divided country, one easily manipulated by bad actors. After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters. Really, no one is in control, as one person says. No one is pulling the strings. And “the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads up.”

A more skillfully crafted movie might have been able to turn that sentiment into something more horror adjacent, or at least a little more discomfiting. But there’s a lot of over-signaling dialogue here: Early on, Clay tells Amanda about a former student who wrote a book about how “media is both an escape and a reflection,” and comments, apropos of nothing, that it’s “a contradiction that she manages to reconcile.” Camerawork choices seem to suggest a third party is watching them — lots of showy overhead spiraling shots, repeated punch-outs to the earth floating in space — but have no narrative payoff. And though the main cast are accomplished, beautiful and intermittently interesting, they feel out of place in a movie that ought to have been a lot more scary, or a lot more subdued. Here, they feel stranded.



The film’s ending seems like a punchline. It’s strongly implied that what will survive the apocalypse is not humanity or beauty or neighborliness or even civilization, but physical media, the DVDs that will still work when the internet and the streamers go down. “Leave the World Behind” is a Netflix movie, so there’s irony in that. But I guess it’s one irony I can get on board with. This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a theme song.







Netflix film. Julia Robert’s and Ethan Hawke. Meh.