Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Leave the World Behind’ on Netflix, an Arch Apocalyptic Thriller Starring Julia Roberts

Haven’t seen an apocalyptic thriller in, oh, a few hours now, but hopefully Leave the World Behind (now streaming on Netflix) will fill the void. Considering the market saturation of said genre, this one surely hopes the talent involved can entice us to press play: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke lead the cast, while Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail – who worked with Roberts on the shows Gaslit and Homecoming – directs, adapting the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam. Will that be enough to fight our weariness for all things end-of-the-world? Let’s find out. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open on an ominous shot of Earth itself, from space. It lingers for a bit. Then, New York City: This is where Amanda (Roberts) and Clay (Hawke) live with their teenage kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). Clay awakes to find his wife packing a suitcase – she couldn’t sleep, and ended up impulsively renting a Long Island home for the weekend. The price was right and everyone here is overworked and stressed and needs to get away, she says. How’d she come to that conclusion, Clay asks? Well, she looked out the window at all the people out there bustling about and doing their thing and came to a profound conclusion: “I f—ing hate people,” she says as the camera zooms in on her to punctuate this bit of ugly, snarky misanthropy. Consider the tone established.

As Clay drives them out to their little vacay spot, the movie takes pains to show the family all using the living crap out of their DEVICES. Clay fiddles with the GPS and Amanda makes a call for work and Archie plays a video game and Rose watches Friends on her tablet. It’s worth noting that she’s obsessed with Friends and has been binging it and will be on the cusp of watching the tantalizing final episode for the first time when her DEVICE freezes up. So tragic! They get to the big nice rental house and as the kids splash in the pool Amanda scoots into town for groceries and spots a redneckish-looking gentleman (Kevin Bacon) loading his pickup with canned goods and water. Curious! She gets back and the fam heads to the beach and hey, is that a big tanker heading right toward the coast? Yup. It just full-speed-aheads right into the sand as everyone scrambles out of the way. I don’t think that’s normal?

They get back and the wifi is out and phone signals are nil. Also curious! That night, the kids are in bed and Amanda and Clay drink wine and play a possibly symbolic or maybe metaphorical or perhaps suggestive game of Jenga when KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. It’s G.H. (Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la). They own the house. Asked why they’re here, and especially so late, G.H. gives some reasons that seem sketchy and unconvincing. (Curious? Yes! Curious!) He seems nice enough, although Ruth narrows her eyes distrustfully at these people. Amanda narrows right back because, well, remember what she said at the beginning of the movie when the camera zoomed in on her, while Clay yins her yang by being a kinda naive fella who assumes that people – these people and people in general – are mostly decent and thinks it’s not that big a deal if they all share the house for the night. Nothing gets better when Amanda asks G.H. for his ID and he gives a lame excuse for not having it, which is sorta believable but still sounds fishy as a hatful of haddock. We learn that G.H. keeps a pistol locked in a drawer, and you know what they say about a gun being introduced in the first act. They see a not-a-drill emergency broadcast system message on the TV and kinda shrug a little then go to bed.

The next morning is when all the fishyness hits the frying pan. A couple messages sneaked onto Amanda’s phone, news alerts about a cyberattack. Clay heads into town to see if he can figure out what’s going on. Ruth and Amanda have prickly conversation at the pool. Archie ogles Ruth in her bathing suit. Rose spots a whole bunch of deer congregating in the backyard, and by “a whole bunch” I mean the herd numbers in the hundreds maybe. SO CURIOUS. G.H. drives over to the neighbor’s house and it’s empty and he finds a satellite phone that doesn’t work and then he walks to the beach and sees wreckage and bodies from a crashed airplane. And we haven’t gotten to the part about the explosions in the distance and the screeching piercing noise that finds the characters clapping hands over their ears and falling to their knees. That’s not normal and, yes, it’s so so CURIOUS. But the big, humongous question hanging in the air waiting to be answered is, will Rose ever get to see how Friends ends? We’re on pins and needles here.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin had a strikingly similar premise.

Performance Worth Watching: Hawke is fairly amusing as a sort-of powerless naif, but like all the actors here, the material is more about scattershot ideas than actual characters. 

Memorable Dialogue: Amanda gets the big, big-picture speech. Here’s an excerpt: “We f— every living thing on the planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free-range chicken.”

Sex and Skin: A pretty low-key shot of a character doing things to themself under the covers.

Our Take: Leave the World Behind is Grade-A bull roar. Horse crap. Pig puckey. Spending time with these people is like pulling on sandpaper briefs and going for a jog. I didn’t believe a single character in this movie. Esmail establishes an arch, wiseass, cynical elbow-in-the-ribs tone that’s likely engineered to keep us off balance, but keeps us at arm’s-length from the characters. Amanda is a prickly lasher-outer who trusts nobody and Clay is a dopey guy who trusts people not because it’s probably the right thing to do, but because it’s the easy thing to do. You might buy the apocalyptic premise – is it aliens attacking or war breaking out or did an earthquake eat California or what? We’re not sure, and the movie leans heavily into that uncertainty – but these characters are capital-W Written in a way that renders them constructs more than believable human beings. 

Plot-wise, this is essentially Red Herrings: The Movie: Why are animals acting strangely? What’s the deal with those pamphlets being dropped by a drone? Is there racial subtext in these interactions? What gives with the hysterical Spanish-speaking woman, her words deliberately not subtitled, Clay meets on the road? Why is there a creepy shed back in the woods that looks like someone’s been sleeping in it? Why does Esmail give us pretentious shots of Earth from the Moon? Is this situation supposed to be a microcosm of modern-day socio-political conflicts? When will Kevin Bacon return to the story? And is this some kind of wicked critique of Friends?

I can answer one of those things: Esmail wants us to laugh at the girl for apparently being more concerned about seeing the Friends finale than the collapse of civilization. And hey, that’s us! That’s me and you, watching TV while wars and environmental collapse and social strife consume the world outside. Don’t you feel stupid now! Esmail aims to agitate via characters swept up by paranoia and a series of episodic occurrences calculated to poke us in sensitive areas. He wants to play us like a violin, but I wanted to slap his hands away: Hey, stop touching my strings. Everything leads to a not-really-a-climax, leaving the film’s thematic intentions purposely vague. Or maybe there’s no intention here at all.

Our Call: Leave the World Behind is shameless manipulation that wields provocation like a shotgun blast. It drove me nuts. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.