LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Leave the World Behind, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

A spontaneous getaway from the city conveniently lines up with an apocalyptic nightmare in Leave the World Behind. Writer/director Sam Esmail's end-of-days thriller makes a few convincing cases, not only in terms of how such a cataclysmic event might occur and unfold, but also in the pointed way it depicts that we're all becoming just a downed internet connection away from total panic, complete disorder, and the upheaval of society as we know it.

That might sound extreme, but just consider how much you've counted on a cellphone, computer, or smart device for your basic needs or distracting desires today. In all seriousness, what would you have done without that technology? Now, multiply that necessity or want by everyone else with internet in the world, and yes, a lot of people would be very bored, very miserable, and, probably, very angry about its absence.

The story here comes from the novel by Rumaan Alam, and it's smart in the way it gives us a small, isolated group of characters to observe, as they wonder about and fear and deny the possibility that the world as they've come to know it has changed and may never go back to what we now consider normal. Esmail's screenplay, unfortunately, never quite makes these characters feel like real people caught up in the midst of a technology-free apocalypse, since they're mostly vehicles to take us from one step of the catastrophe to the next and to make speeches when the pattern becomes a bit too repetitive.

That's a significant issue here, especially since most of the story is essentially a chamber drama—in which said chamber is a remote modern mansion on Long Island—of rising tension and conflict. It is helped a bit, though, by the convictions of the actors, who do their best to make these characters feel more authentic than the script allows them to be.

The family on an impulsive vacation from Brooklyn is made up of advertising rep Amanda (Julia Roberts), her professor husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and the couple's two children, 1990s-TV-obsessed pre-teen Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and hormone-raging teenager Archie (Charlie Evans). On a whim, Amanda has rented that lavish house for a weekend, where she and Clay can relax and forget about work, while the kids can enjoy the pool and spend as much time on screens as they want.

It all sounds great, but then, the house's internet goes down, the cable TV only shows a lot of snowy static, and the cell signal vanishes. Then, there's a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

It's G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his college-aged daughter Ruth (Myha'la). He says he owns this house and has come from the city proper because of a blackout. Easygoing Clay believes him without question, but Amanda isn't convinced—even when he unlocks a cabinet, where he knows some cash is located to refund a part of the rental fee. The two families are stuck here with a lot of suspicion and a bit of resentment building up between some of them.

This is a very fine setup for the human drama—or melodrama, depending on how things go—at the core of this story, but this is also a movie about the end of the world as we know it. Esmail doesn't want us to forget that, and the filmmaker often goes out of his way to bypass the private and interpersonal problems arising here in order to remind us.

That results in some haunting moments and images, to be sure. One has G.H. wandering over to a neighbor's house, hoping to find out if the nearby residents have any clue what's happening, only to find a scene of mass death and destruction on the beach. Another scene has the seemingly kind Clay lost on the road and happening upon a woman who's stranded there, and if there's a performance that stands out among an accomplished group of them, it comes from Hawke, whose optimistic Clay finds his worldview and his own moral compass challenged—and not always resulting in the altruism he hopes to possess and put into the world—with this new reality.

Those two vignettes, as well as a couple others, are presented in the first of a couple sequences of suspense-building cross-cutting, as assorted characters gradually see something and we're less quickly allowed to observe what they're witnessing. It feels a bit too cheap and distracting under the circumstances, since the real heart of this story isn't what happens to the characters but how they react to everything as it unfolds. It's a constant back-and-forth here, between those more grounded scenes of the characters learning to trust each other, even as they hide and lie about and deflect from some truth that's too terrifying to say aloud, and the spectacle that's possible with the apocalyptic backdrop of the tale.

The resulting balance isn't quite right, since that spectacle can be so over-the-top (Two scenes have characters trying to outrun large vehicles, while another has a group avoiding a herd of smaller ones) and the dialogue—as well as, especially, those monologues—is so intent on explaining things we don't really need to know. Leave the World Behind does still make a convincing argument for what a potential catastrophe could look like, but the drama within it is a bit lacking.

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