‘Leave the World Behind’ Review: Sam Esmail Explores the End of the World in Ultimately Unsatisfying Psychological Thriller
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023) Myha’la as Ruth, Mahershala Ali as G.H., Ethan Hawke as Clay and Julia Roberts as Amanda. CR: JoJo Whilden/NETFLIX
As we’ve learned over the past couple of years, there have been two types of post-pandemic movies to come out of our top creators’ minds. We have the “revisiting my childhood” wave, spearheaded by movies like Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. There are also the “questioning my own existence” films, with Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City being the prime example — now joined by Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind.
The Mr. Robot creator explains in the press notes how he was inspired by the Rumaan Alam novel it’s based on and combined that with his long-time interest in doing a disaster movie that would include some sort of cyber attack. But it’s clear from the context the movie is released in that the COVID-19 pandemic affected some of the themes explored in the movie, as well as how they are approached.
Set in a world just like ours, Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) decide to go on a spontaneous week-long vacation to try to escape from their own lives, overwhelmed by work pressures and life in the big city. They take their two kids with them, 16-year-old “leave me alone” Archie (Charlie Evans) and “I’m going to die if I don’t watch the Friends finale right now” Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). The “something’s off” feelings that start to permeate the family’s seemingly-normal vacation (Clay is allowed a cigarette and 15 minutes of sex every once in a while) after a giant boat crashes into the beach they were hanging out at are sent through the roof when two strangers arrive in the middle of the night: G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la), who claim to be the owners of the house they Airbnb’d.
This already presents the first conflict between two characters that the movie thrives at exploring. Roberts’ Amanda, whose motherly protective instincts spike, is highly suspicious of the two people at their rented doorstep, and cannot wait to see them get lost into the night. Clay, however, does not get the same vibe and is more understanding of a man practically falling to his knees in the middle of an overnight power outage that brought him and his daughter to rely on the kindness of strangers to survive. It’s an unusual situation, and he asks himself “What would I have done?”, realizes that he’d be in the same spot, and tries to get the upper hand on karma.
Leave the World Behind (2023) Ethan Hawke as Clay and Julia Roberts as Amanda. Cr: JoJo Whilden/NETFLIX
Leave the World Behind is a psychological thriller that uses our familiarization with end-of-the-world feelings through our survival of the global pandemic in 2020 to get under our skin. It presents a situation where a series of events that look unusual, but that isolated wouldn’t necessarily raise the alarm, quickly starts to escalate, and life as we know it will never be the same. There’s a mystery box element to it, as our characters try to figure out what is going on exactly. The morning after, the kids wake up and can’t exactly understand why two strangers slept in the basement. G.H. goes to his neighbor’s place and finds himself in even more unusual circumstances. And Clay tries to go into town to find out what is going on, but soon realizes it’s too big for him to ever understand.
From the mind behind some of TV’s strangest shot compositions comes a film that overuses camera tricks, unusual blocking, and off-putting editing to try to enhance our anxiety over what is being displayed on screen. And even though I’m all for pushing the language of cinema to its limits, with Leave the World Behind it feels like Esmail couldn’t hack the rule of a big setup must be met with an equally big payoff. And that’s sort of where the problem with the film lies: the resolution of the mystery underneath the psychological thriller comes a little too late and seems a little underwhelming for the lengths the writer-director went in the first two-and-a-half acts to introduce it.
The truth is that the core of the story, where the questions that Esmail is trying to get at, lies in the relationships between the characters. The human drama that ensues after the world starts to collapse around two different families that are brought together by fate. And Esmail aims for the stars, asking questions about our modern society, our relationship to technology and how that’s affected our own relationships, how teenagers and young adults live and think now versus what it used to be like — but it also tackles much bigger questions, from parenting to race.
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023) Mahershala Ali as G.H. and Julia Roberts as Amanda. CR: JoJo Whilden/NETFLIX
The setting of this film, with a family going to the middle of the woods for an escape and having strangers show up at their door while the world seems to be coming to an end, is nothing new. M. Night Shyamalan did it less than a year ago, with Knock at the Cabin, a film that ultimately proved more successful because, for all its biblical allegories and questions about society, it didn’t aim as high, and therefore, didn’t miss as much.
Esmail, through Leave the World Behind, does focus on the interactions between characters to build those themes and questions; however, it’s his equally weighted effort to set up the big mystery of why the world is falling apart, and how fruitless that ultimately turns out to be, that kind of sinks the movie by the end. And that’s despite a technically-qualifying cameo by Kevin Bacon towards the end of the movie to remind us that, despite all we think we know about the people around us, sometimes it’s those who we think we can rely on that turn their back on us, whereas sometimes the kindness of strangers can save us from crumbling.
Leave the World Behind is currently streaming on Netflix.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
