‘Leave the World Behind’ — Sam Esmail’s Doomsday Scenario

The creator of ‘Mr. Robot’ takes a stab at the apocalypse.

There’s a scene early on in Sam Esmail’s latest Netflix mystery thriller, Leave the World Behind, where matriarch Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts) is overflowing with joy while viewing the gorgeous weekend house she rented for her family to get away from the city. This comes after her “I fucking hate people” speech, a cynical and arrogant monologue setting the mood for the film so precisely. I’d be lying if I said that her attitude and hostility towards people didn’t touch the introvert and misanthrope in me to some degree. And that's what Esmail wants: hang onto your cynicism and bitterness, sure, and then see how much it helps you when the whole world goes to shit, and you'll be more alone than you ever wished in your life.

Leave the World Behind plays like an alternative, more nuanced version to Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin — another restrained, low-key apocalyptic movie from this year, focusing on a small group of people — that concerns itself with the fate of humanity. Yet Esmail isn’t all that interested in the supernatural aspect of the unfolding apocalypse but rather in its societal effects on two (one and a half?) wealthy families who struggle to set aside their privilege and smugness during an unraveling chaos. After all, social and racial prejudice doesn’t cease to exist just because the world is ending, right?

There are quite a few deliciously unnerving plot points in Esmail’s adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — an oil tanker’s haunting approach, the eerie gaze of hordes of deer, or Kevin Bacon’s dishonest smile while holding a shotgun — that gradually turn up the tension to eleven between our protagonists. Presented through the writer-director’s visually arresting and off-putting aesthetics (which made his best works like Mr. Robot and Homecoming so fascinating), these moments certainly fill every doomsday enthusiast's heart with nervous excitement. Yet this isn’t the type of film that follows through these incidents with breathtaking action or a horror-heavy bloodbath. The primary angle here is to show how these people react to a distressingly unfolding potential apocalypse.

The most appealing aspect of Leave the World Behind is watching the fear taking hold of these characters while they desperately try to rationalize and explain everything that’s happening around them. The dynamics between Amanda, her laid-back buffoon of a husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), their two ignorant kids, and Mahershala Ali’s secretive George and his obnoxious daughter, Ruth (Myha’la), is what creates a connection to truly resonate with them. Esmail constantly forces us to put ourselves into these people's shoes and consider what would we do.

Would we let two strangers in our rental who claim to be its owners without proper proof or identification? Would we trust them to stay overnight while our children sleep a floor above them? Would we believe a conspiracy theory they reluctantly share as a possible explanation for the world going nuts? The script bravely explores these dilemmas and isn’t afraid to give us plausible answers. These characters are smart enough to establish credibility and act reasonably despite their growing worries and paranoia, which steadily absorb them as the inexplicable events become more and more severe.

Yet underneath the trepidation, there's a recurring black humor here, simultaneously poking fun at the rich and making them oddly relatable, because, in the end, money and wealth are useless if you find yourself against forces you can’t control. Your options are quickly reduced to making peace with the people you might not trust or like but who are the only ones you can count on when planes start falling out of the sky and Teslas turn self-aware. This is a scenario where you have to reconsider your stance on people and forget whether you hate them in order to have a chance at survival. Apparently, even someone as hateful, prejudiced, and irritatingly self-absorbed as Amanda can change her opinion about humanity when her immediate family’s existence is in danger. After all, what does it all matter if most of the world’s population gets wiped out, leaving virtually nobody to distance yourself from?

Leave the World Behind doesn’t reinvent the genre in any way (and will surely leave some viewers wanting more) but effectively evokes a doomsday dread and raises interesting questions to find answers to. And frankly, it’s refreshing to see a narrative that doesn’t shy away from taking a stand on what might lead to the doom of us all.

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Last week, I reviewed the third season of Apple TV+’s terrific spy drama, Slow Horses. Since the year is almost over, this is my last review in 2023, but I may be back with a “best of” list sooner or later.

Thank you for reading The Screen this year, and I hope you’ll join me in 2024, too.

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