A film review by Craig J. Koban December 20, 2023

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND ½

2023, R, 140 mins.

Julia Roberts as Amanda  /  Mahershala Ali as G.H.  /  Ethan Hawke as Clay  /  Myha'la as Ruth  /  Kevin Bacon as Danny

ORIGINAL FILM

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND explores what would happen if a well-off family went to a rural New York vacation home and then very slowly and gradually learned that some sort of apocalyptic event was happening in America around them.  

This kind of film feels awfully familiar at first, especially coming off of other similar and recent films like KNOCK AT THE CABIN or the Netflix made WHITE NOISE (the streaming giant also produced this film as well).  What's decidedly different, though, about writer/director Sam Esmail's (creator of TV's MR. ROBOT) work here is that it doesn't take the obligatory path as most other end of the world scenarios and instead explores the psychological ramifications of one clan coming to realize that society is eroding around them...and they can't do anything to stop it.  He also places great confidence in his superlative cast to help drive this character-driven suspense thriller and engages in some thoughtful discourse about our obsessive relationship with technology and what happens when we no longer have access to it.  LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND emerges as smart, timely, and more than a bit unnerving to the core.

Adapting the 2020 Rumaan Alam novel of the same name, Esmail sets up his film with relative simplicity.  We meet Amanda (Julia Roberts) and her husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), with the former yearning to get as far away from chaotic big city life and flee to a recently secured and extremely luxurious rental that's quite far removed from The Big Apple.  Amanda seems more keen on the vacation than Clay, and the film firmly establishes her as a fairly grumpy persona that seems to take great relish in hating people in general.  The couple packs up some belongings and bring their kids - Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) - to the home in question, which is more of a decadent mansion than a quaint little get-away cottage.  Regardless, this family relishes their new surroundings and also looks forward to hitting the nearby beach for some much needed R & R.  

But then...weird things begin to occur.  

Like...really weird.  

For starters, during one routine trip to the beach the family experiences a gigantic oil tanker starting to get alarmingly close to the shore...and then closer...and then closer...until it washes up right on it, almost as if no one was steering the vessel.  

That's really weird, to say the least.  

Soon afterwards, it appears that the rental home's Wi-Fi is down and access to the Internet and using phones becomes impossible (this really upsets poor little Rose, as she was just in the middle of streaming the final few episodes of her FRIENDS series binge-watch). Then other odd phenomena pop up, like an abnormal number of deer and wildlife showing up at the rental home's backyard without any rhyme or reason.  Things escalate for the concerned Amanda and Clay with the appearance of a strange father and daughter at their door one night, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha'la), with the former claiming to be the actual owner of the rental home and is now requesting to use the spare room in the basement to sleep after apparently fleeing from New York after a massive blackout.   

The deeply distrusting Amanda has a great deal of trouble trusting G.H. at first, but why would this man lie about being the owner of the home?  That, and with communications apparently down everywhere around them, he was completely incapable of texting or calling Amanda and Clay to warn them of their abrupt arrival.  Clay - being a carefree spirit - welcomes them with open arms, but Amanda remains highly guarded.  She's growing more paranoid by the minute as to what's happening in the world around them when readily accessible information is impossible to access, and now she has to deal with strangers that she's never met face to face before.  Things take a turn for the worse when she receives a very fleeting emergency broadcast message on her phone of an impeding cyber attack on America, which causes her to panic even more.  G.H. is also concerned, seeing as his wife was traveling by airplane before the blackout and hasn't been able to communicate with any family member since, leading to him fearing for her life.  But something seems a tad off about G.H. as well, almost as is he may - or may not - know what in the h-e-double hockey sticks is happening to the world at large and is suppressing it from Amanda and Clay, adding more fuel to the fire of this pressure cooker of a situation.  

One of the best things about Esmail's approach in LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND is how he's able to build powerful tension and an undulating sensation of unease in all of these players based on what they know and don't know about each other and the real nature of the events that are transpiring to what seems like most of the U.S.  The story begins with Amanda and Clay acclimating to what should be a peaceful and perfectly safe home away from home that gradually begins to unravel before their very eyes.  This film's setup and execution is grandly done, with Esmail unleashing one unspeakably eerie sequence after another that starts to destabilize this family's sense of perceived security.  The aforementioned oil tanker crash is staggeringly effective as it's shown plowing right into that beach, but the unsettling imagery doesn't end there.  Aside from multiple moments of deer appearing and disappearing at will (with creepy stares being pointed directly at the already frazzled family), we soon see the large-scale ramifications of the technological blackout.  Planes start crashing out of the sky at random and - in one hauntingly terrifying sequence - hundreds upon hundreds of driverless Tesla cars start to converge on the same spot and hammer into one another.  Then there's a peculiar drone that starts to drop some very scary looking cargo much to Clay's panic (in a superbly tension-filled scene) and - several times in the film - ear-splitting noise comes from the sky that renders everyone on the ground totally defenseless.  This is clearly no ordinary power outage.  The world sure seems to be ending...right?

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND doesn't go out of its way to lay its cards down on the table too quickly to explain this cataclysmic event.  Instead, the film wants viewers to immerse themselves into panic-stricken headspaces of the characters and witness how they react to try to preserve whatever semblance of normalcy and order they can at that rental home.  One element that really hits home is how people seem hopelessly and unhealthily glued to technology in various forms to give them a false sense of security and bliss.  We have ceded so much of our very modern lives to smartphones, laptops, the Internet, social media, streaming, and having instant access to anything at anytime that we feel powerless and vulnerable when these conveniences are abruptly taken from us.  These two families are rendered pretty helpless when the world does break down and their devices don't work (on one tense attempt to seek help on the country roads beyond the rental home, Clay gets utterly lost without having access to GPS).  LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND wisely evokes how the illusion of order with tech can be shattered in an instant and how some people seem incapable of carrying on without it.  Rose seems more scared by not being able to stream the last episode of FRIENDS than she is of the world around her potentially ending. 

The cast all brings their A-game here, especially Roberts, who has perhaps never played such an openly hostile force of nature in a film before.  Amanda is not only self-centered to the max, but also harbors some deeply unflattering opinions of her new black guests in G.H. and Ruth, probably stemming from her white privilege.  There's considerable racial tension between these two families, mostly instigated by Amanda's unflattering suspicions of them (it's a wonderful stroke to cast Roberts in this role, which is so diametrically opposed to the type of sunny dispositioned and likable roles that have typified her career).  Hawke is an effective foil here to Roberts, playing a relatively cool and collected father figure that's perhaps too chill for his own good in terms of prepping him for what's to come.  Ali is predictably stalwart as well, playing a very tricky character that may or may not be telling the whole truth throughout the film.  He has a couple of memorable standoff scenes with Roberts as both characters try to let their defenses down and grow to understand one another.  I think one area where the film falters a bit is in developing the racial tensions between these characters to its satisfying fullest.  Ali and Roberts have such remarkable push-pull chemistry on screen that I'm almost willing to forgive how Esmail seems to rap up their heated relationship with too much tidiness.