Leave the World Behind
Written and Directed by Sam Esmail
Starring: Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Myha'la
Rated R
Runtime: 2 hours, 21 minutes
In theaters November 22, On Netflix December 8

by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

Waiting to see if the world will go “back to normal” and discovering that it may never do so can be excruciating, as the characters in Leave the World Behind discover. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, Sam Esmail takes on the story of a family’s vacation and pulls the viewer through waves of anxiety.

With a star-studded cast, this flick follows Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) as they take their children, Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie), to an AirBnB to escape the city for the weekend. But when the owner of the AirBNB, G.H. (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha'la), show up late at night and need to stay, things start to get uncomfortable. G.H. and Ruth’s rational explanations don’t jive with Amanda’s racist assumptions, and things get worse—then better and then worse again—from there. Combine all that with an encounter with Danny (Kevin Bacon), a doomsday prepper who previously worked on renovating G.H.’s house, and you’ve got the makings of an unsettling pseudo-disaster flick.

I don’t want to spend much time comparing this to the novel, which I read and enjoyed last year, but I do want to mention that the book stays much more insular. While it is confirmed that something is happening in the book, we don’t get the answer the movie gives us. It felt like a disaster story was going on off-page, and we only got these characters’ reactions to it. Sort of like showing a monster too early in a creature feature, the ambiguity is part of the fun. I’m not sure this movie needed a real explanation for what’s happening, though I can see wanting to provide a definitive answer.

Some of the changes expand the world without actually leaving the house. For example, the film makes Ruth G.H.’s daughter and explains that G.H.’s wife was away and intended to fly back the next day; in the novel, it’s G.H. and his wife, Ruth, who show up at the door, and there’s no real concern for anyone outside the house. But I find that some other changes–especially around the resolution with Danny and the final explanation of what the potential disaster is–are strange.

The added subplot with the daughter’s plight to see the series finale of Friends, a reminder of the importance of physical media, was really fun. The son has a bit less to do in the beginning other than creep on Ruth by the pool (yikes), but I thought all three of the younger cast did a great job. Myha'la, in particular, had a tough job going up against Julia Roberts in a scene toward the end, and she absolutely delivered.

This is an extremely heavy-handed film. The score is overbearing at times, pumping the uneasiness up as high as it can go. There are repeated transition shots to situation you in the house, but after you’ve seen it once, it’s not really as exciting the next few times. Some of the uneasiness works, but at a certain point, it felt like overkill. How many off-kilter overhead shots does one film need?

Likewise, there’s some very straightforward dialogue in here. Toward the beginning, I almost expected Julia Roberts to turn to the camera and say the title of the film, and then she did drop the title about two minutes later. Two monologues toward the end just completely explain everything about each character’s motivations, and they felt too on-the-nose to really work for me. These moments in particular seemed like wrapping up character arcs so we can root for them to make it through this potential dystopia, which felt unnecessary. They can be bad people. I don’t have to like them in order to want them to survive.

However, one of the most effective parts of the movie for me was seeing how Amanda and G.H. tried to dole out information to their respective children without causing fear. How to reveal to the kids that something is happening in the city? When should G.H. tell Ruth that he saw airplanes crashing on the beach? Because this is one of the few things they can control, or at least try to, it’s interesting to see their calculations on how to hold onto some control when everything else is spiraling. The sharing of information between a group of six people shouldn’t be so compelling, but it is here.

On the whole, I think this is a really interesting film, though I’m not sure it fully comes together by the end. I wanted to see what these characters would go through. The acting was great, of course, and some of the set pieces were really compelling. But the overbearing directorial choices and occasionally clunky dialogue didn’t help. I’ll definitely be thinking about the film for a while, regardless.