Leave the World Behind: This is the Way the World Ends, With Mystery Guests and Unanswered Questions
By Chris Knight
Rating: B-plus
Leave the World Behind feels like what you would get if you took this year’s Knock at the Cabin and knocked the Shyamalan out of it.
Both are paranoid apocalyptic thrillers centered on a nuclear family spending time in an out-of-the-way location when (A) strangers arrive at the door and (B) the world seems to be ending — but maybe not? Both are based on recent novels, although Leave the World Behind hews more closely to its source material, perhaps because author Rumaan Alam adapted it for the screen.
Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold
It gets off to a jerky start, playing as though every studio department head was fighting for dominance. The score is super-creepy, the camerawork uber-showy, the dialogue extra explainy — heck, even the opening credits are bombastic and overproduced. Every third shot is either from an extreme overhead vantage or filmed at a 90-degree tilt.
That style never really settles down, but you do get used to it, thanks in no small part to the talents of its cast, who refuse to be overshadowed by the production values.
Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke are Amanda and Clay, a New York couple who have rented a house on Long Island to get away from everything —especially people, whom Amanda finds infuriating. (Given the way she treats others, the feelings are probably mutual.)
On their first night in the well-appointed home with their two teenaged kids, a knock on the door reveals George (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la Herrold). They claim to be the owners of the house, who have driven out from the city because of a power blackout there.
Amanda is immediately suspicious of George’s suavity. Ruth assumes it’s because they’re Black. Clay, easygoing and gregarious, plays the peacekeeper. And so, the two families bunk down together with various levels of unease and mistrust as they try to figure out: What is going on?
The answer to that question — or, for a long time, the lack of a clear answer — is what drives the movie forward. At its best moments, Leave the World Behind plays into all our modern global insecurities: nature out of whack; technology operating at a bizarre nexus where it’s both failing and yet somehow also working too well; and the sense that, as George succinctly puts it: “No one is in control.”
And no one knows anything. When George takes them to his neighbour Danny (Kevin Bacon) seeking information and maybe some help, the baseball-hatted survivalist assures them the whole mess is the work of North Korea. “Or maybe China,” he adds.
All they know for certain is that weird things are happening, things that sometimes play out as though an A.I. had been put in charge of the shoot. There’s something disturbingly uncanny about the image of a huge red oil tanker heading toward a placid beach at ramming speed; a roadway blocked by a pileup of dozens of identical white electric sedans; or a forest full of still and silent deer.
Leave the World Behind is not perfect — a little long at two hours and 18 minutes, and a little too talky in the final act — but it is emotional and affecting and very of-the-moment. Even one character’s obsession with the ’90s TV hit Friends (she’s been streaming it, uncertain what a “rerun” is) creates an unplanned frisson as we’re reminded of the recent death of Matthew “Chandler” Perry.
And the opening lyrics of the show’s theme — “So no one told you life was gonna be this way” — could operate as a sly subtitle to this disturbing drama.
Leave the World Behind. Directed by Sam Esmail. Starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali. Opens Nov. 24 in theatres, and Dec. 8 on Netflix.