Leave the World Behind (2023)

Score: 4.5 / 5

A relentlessly intriguing, engaging, and frustrating experience, Leave the World Behind is one of the most purely entertaining and provocative films of the past year, and I can't get it out of my head. Soon I intend to read the novel on which it is based and re-watch the film in the hopes of giving my brain some closure, but in the meantime, this will have to suffice. Unceremoniously debuting on Netflix in December, this thriller boasts some breakneck plot shifts, blockbuster visuals, and effectively gut-punching acting in ways that had me repeatedly gobsmacked during its two hours and twenty minutes.

To start with: plot and tone. I'll try not to spoil too much, but no promises; you've been warned. The story is essentially about a family in NYC who visit a Long Island mansion for a weekend away from their busy lives, only to have a series of strange and terrifying events occur that cut off their ability to return home or communicate with the outside world, indicating the onset of some apocalyptic event. Not "apocalypse" as in the literal end of the world, but in the sense of the revelation that certain unknown powers are taking over by force and the foreboding threat that everyone's lives are about to change, if they survive. The plot moves along swiftly, from credible threats to believable incidents, including the knockout of satellites and transit comms to the failure of ship and plane navigation systems, even to the spread of (likely) misinformation and scapegoating of possible terrorists or shadow uprisings. It's all a little too familiar a fear for us these days, and the film plays on the mystery to inform our suspense.

But the film is not always -- is, in fact, rarely -- focused on the macro picture. Rather, everything is filtered for us through the eyes and ears of the family we follow. Amanda Sanford, her husband Clay, and their children Rose and Archie are excited for their time away until, once at the mansion, the house's owners show up at night. Issues of class and race bleed into their confrontation: the Sanfords (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, white) do not trust the strangers G.H. Scott and much younger Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha'la, not white), who claim to own the house but their story for why they needed to return doesn't quite add up. A power outage and some chaos in the city could perhaps be the cause, but their demeanor is prickly and sly; Amanda's latent racism peeks through in her suspicion and in her indignation at having booked the mansion for her own family's use. I was reminded more than once of the social anxiety milked to dramatic tension in the first act of Barbarian.

Writer and director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot, Gaslit) knows about the cinematic language of post-apocalytpic movies and exploits it in what is essentially something just shy of it: a conspiracy apocalypse. This isn't the energy of A Quiet Place: Day One (to be released this year) in literalizing the likely end of humanity. This is something more like what we saw in Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, in The Purge films, and I suspect in Alex Garland's upcoming Civil War. It's something, indeed, that M. Night Shyamalan has handled multiple times, in The Happening and most particularly in Knock at the Cabin, which shares a lot of DNA with this film. Enough weird, threatening things happen that the characters are led to believe that NYC is being overtaken by terrorists in some kind of coup. But the film is less concerned with how that seems on a massive scale than in how those events affect the family and their newfound friends, their socializing and their hope, their ability to communicate and rationalize and cooperate.

Apart from the more horrifying elements of crashing freighters and planes and EVs, the film ratchets up its almost unbearable tension on the domestic level, and most of the film's middle comprises the interactions between the house owners, the Black father and daughter (and missing mother) who want to be home, and the house guests, the white family who lie to their children about what's happening and feel entitled to the house and its resources (because they paid for it, dammit). While I don't recall accusations of racism being verbalized in the dialogue, it is exactly this racial tension that electrifies each scene, often squaring Roberts off against Ali in riveting scene after scene. For an "end of the world" film to focus on home invasion and racism is an unusual gamble, and I found it a profoundly successful one.

Add to it some amazing cinematography from Tod Campbell, which would have worked better in cinemas due to his sweeping visual scope and his attention to endless production design details. Add to it Kevin Bacon in a bit part of an off-the-grid doomsday stockpiler who serves as the film's harbinger. Add to it a curiously detached feeling about death -- mass deaths are okay, but the deaths of the characters we know apparently are not -- and this movie shies away from what could be disturbing horror, settling for a much more standard, palatable stock thriller that is nevertheless very effective at what it attempts to do. It's a really extraordinary surprise of a film, not one I expected at all, even while watching! This wonderfully realized puzzle box deserves a watch, and then some.