Given this rising age of anxiety we’re in, where problems of uncertainty and instability feel like they’re global and yet local, intimate, and personal too, writer/director Sam Esmail’s unnerving global collapse thriller, “Leave The World Behind,” feels like it arrives at an all-too-perfectly timed moment. Its opening moments are arresting. Ethan Hawke’s father character, Clay Sanford, worries about job insecurity while his wife, Amanda (a terrifically cynical Julia Roberts, seemingly relishing to play a character this pessimistic and dark), stares out the window and delivers a striking monologue. “This year has been hell,” she intones, cutting deep with relatable words. She ruminates optimistically on the possibilities of the day—the camera slowly zooming in on her—what she could accomplish, where she could go, what she can do, before hitting upon her realization about life and the world. Cut to a hard zoom: “I f*cking hate people,” she hisses. Smash cut to flexing Joey Bada$$ trap, big daunting title cards, and “Leave The World Behind” is off and running with a terrific opening.
To get away from it all—and to force her husband out of worrying objections— she books a last-minute luxurious Air B’nB-style getaway to Long Island, and the family (two kids played by Farrah Mackenzie and Charlie Evans) whisks off in a car immediately. Once settled, things are relatively normal until a strange incident occurs: an oil tanker, seemingly out of control, crashes on the shore, making all the beachgoers run for their lives (and maybe this has something to do with the ominous opening shots of satellites quietly orbiting the planet). Briefly disquieted, the strong human need for normalcy eventually lulls everyone back into staring-at-devices complacency.
But all hell breaks loose when society loses its signal, though, right? Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a sharp-looking Black pair rings the doorbell: G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold of “Industry”), the owners of the Air B’nB rental. Yet Amanda—quickly revealing herself to be the ugly, scornful Karen of the picture, quickly questions everything. You people are the owners of this utterly fabulous and fancy house filled to the brim with top-shelf liquor?? And may we see some I.D. to validate these claims? She may not say it as nasty and blunt as that (though close), but her vulgar, discriminate tone might as well, and it immediately raises Ruth’s hackles and White people racist-dar.
But something is certainly amiss. Phone lines are down, cell service is disrupted, and G.H. and Ruth were so nervous about what seemed to be mounting chaos in Manhattan that they fled back to Long Island to find reprieve, forced into the awkward position of asking their renters if they could stay the night. “Make yourselves at home,” Hawke says, biting his tongue immediately after at the irony of his awkward choice of words.
Within a deft fifteen minutes, Esmail (the creator of “Mr. Robot”) has constructed a deliciously intriguing setup for his distressing thriller of American doubt, human apprehension, and profound social uneasiness. Something disturbing seems to be on the rise, and even in this tiny microcosm of six people— the Sanford and Scott family— tensions are immediately running high, trust is in question, and personal (and racial) bias is off the charts. Want to know what might happen if the world descended into panic? Hell, we’re not even close to a five-alarm concern, and Esmail poignantly paints a depressingly realistic portrait of how fast it could all go south.
From there, the mystery of what’s truly going on in the outside world grows—something about a potential global cyberattack—sometimes uneasily, sometimes clumsily, but “Leave The World Behind” is picture-perfect when it’s framed as an all-too-intimate chamber drama about strangers chafing against each other with alarming prejudice, distrust, and suspicion. And the film is always brilliant when it unveils uncomfortable truths about (white) people. The Sanford’s, especially Clay, are clearly liberal Brooklyn folk who voted for Obama, support Black Lives Matter, and probably adorned their houses with signs claiming they believe in science, masking, facts, and that love is love.
But at the first sign of trouble and discomfort, the masks drop, and the Sanfords, or at least Amanda, go into a disturbingly mistrustful, wary, and bigoted fight or flight mode of purely patented American self-interest.
When “Leave The World Behind” is playing, prodding, and poking this social texture—part satire, part disaster thriller— it’s firing on all cylinders and utterly wicked, delectable and gripping.
Less successful, though, are moments when the families leave the claustrophobic confines, venturing into the world and getting stymied by dubious creative choices further marred by unconvincing VFX (there’s an entire recurring element of hordes of curious, no, ominous deer surrounding the houses and characters, and each time, it’s jarringly unpersuasive). It’s as if “Leave The World Behind” is a perfectly fabricated stage play, and anytime the players leave those parameters, the film starts to wobble, somehow just intrinsically resisting the movie’s own urge to show the outside world’s drama.
As the title suggests, “Leave The World Behind” literally and figuratively is about fleeing from the world’s mounting problems and worries to what feels like the last remaining enclave of tranquility. This hamlet of safety is immediately disturbed and challenged by other people—people you don’t know, which the film makes the persuasive case, are the scariest things anyone could ever face.
Kevin Bacon enters the picture in the third act as the conspiracy theorist truther character— you know, the type of character overpreparing and stockpiling for Armageddon for years—but it’s almost as if the movie doesn’t need him by that point (though some of the pointed notions about paranoia, mass delusion, and hysteria are upsetting stuff). Again, “Leave The World Behind” is at its best with its core premise of intermingling families and the tenuous faith and bargains they create to delude themselves into thinking everything will be ok.
“We’re in this together,” Roberts’ delightfully awful Amanda character insists later in the picture, having bonded with G.H. and perhaps even believing what she says in the moment. But the damage has been done, and Esmail has convincingly made the case that our collective faith in humanity, each other, and other people is at an all-time low in his chilling survival drama.
“Leave The World Behind” isn’t as perfect as its best-written moments —the ones that are somehow expertly frightening, funny, stressful, and cleverly observational, all at the same time—and the movie even f*cks up its Chekov’s gun tease. But as a wicked, playful, tension-filled, and alarming treatise on humanity, its deep flaws, and how fragile, questionable, scattered, and thus vulnerable we are to attack? Oh boy, the worst apocalypse one can imagine is of our own making, and it might just compel you to start building your bunker now. [B+]
“Leave The World Behind” debuts on Netflix on December 8.
