Netflix’s Leave the World Behind

Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts, and Ethan Hawke in Leave the World Behind.
Photo: Netflix/Courtesy NETFLIX

We’ve always lived in the shadow of apocalypse — any given human at any given point in time will perceive their present as the end of history — but we’ve rarely lived through such a boom time for apocalyptic cultural products as we do right now. Published in the particularly cataclysmic year of 2020, Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind offered a tense psychological drama about two New York families forced together in a remote rural vacation home right as a vague, humanity-threatening catastrophe appeared to be unfolding. Despite its premise, the book wasn’t really a science-fiction thriller; its perspective remained ground level, its true apocalypse emotional. But the terrifying glimpses of what was happening in the world outside also lent it a cosmic urgency.

Movies adapted from books have absolutely zero obligation to remain faithful to their source material. (For a masterclass in tossing out everything but title and setting, check out Jonathan Glazer’s upcoming The Zone of Interestwhich has almost nothing to do with the Martin Amis novel it’s based on.) It can, however, get a little irritating for those familiar with the original if every change made for the adaptation happens to be for the worse.

Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind takes the characters and incidents of Alam’s novel and situates them inside a more pronounced, though not particularly convincing, apocalyptic thriller. Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) are a well-to-do Brooklyn couple who’ve rented a vacation house in a rural enclave outside of New York City with their two teenage kids. Not long after they arrive, however, certain unnerving incidents begin to occur, most notably a massive tanker running aground on a crowded beach. One night, a man in a black tie, George (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), arrive and ask to be let in. They are, it turns out, the owners of the property and have driven all the way out here after the city was plunged into a blackout. The casual, go-along-to-get-along Clay is happy to let them in, but the anxious, vaguely Karen-y Amanda is immediately suspicious of the two African Americans.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity. If Alam’s novel is about all the awkward ways these two families collide and cohere, Esmail’s film at first seems to be about the opposite. He separates them, sending them off to discover crazy scenes of the end times on their own: planes falling from the sky, ominous red leaflets gathering in the sky like pestilential clouds. Maybe the point is that every person suffers their own Armageddon. The fragmentation of experiences, the inability to see anything as a whole, is perhaps meant to speak to our fractured, distracted psyches. But these characters remain stick figures, mere avatars placed in neato disaster sequences instead of humans experiencing an unspeakable horror. Even when they start to bond later in the film, through awkward monologues and old pop records, we never feel like we’re there with them. It’s too little, too late, and not very good to begin with.

Still, the film might have worked had the apocalyptic visions presented onscreen been interesting, or terrifying, or even convincing. (There are, after all, plenty of good disaster movies with lousy characters and even worse dialogue.) But Esmail uses the story’s ambiguity almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card, piling on the weird events without actually telling us what’s happening. He half-asses it, in other words. This feels more like a collection of cool ideas the writer-director jotted down and collected in a box rather than scenes that belong to the same emotional and consequential continuum. (There are some nice bits nevertheless: An endless traffic jam of driverless Teslas on Auto-pilot driving into each other is an inspired idea that could one day show up in a better movie.)

Look, this is all just a fancy way of saying I didn’t buy anything in this picture — not the incidents, not the characters, not the dialogue. Maybe it’s just me. Esmail is a smart, creative guy. One does wonder though if he’s tried too hard to bend this material to his will rather than open himself up to see where these people and this premise take him. Even his camera, with its precise compositions and ominous moves, feels divorced from the actual drama onscreen. A dizzying bird’s-eye crane shot inside the house early on is nifty, to be sure, but when a variation on the same shot shows up again later, we might wonder if it would have worked better had it been deployed during a key turning point rather than as an early attempt to snazz things up. I was at times reminded of M. Night Shyamalan’s Cabin in the Woodsanother liberal adaptation of a small-scale apocalyptic novel released earlier this year. There, the director’s delicate handling of the material, his careful use of offscreen space, and the savvy drip-drip-drip of narrative information all contributed to an unnerving, moving experience. Through an intense focus on the particular, Shyamalan found the universal.

Leave the World Behind perhaps aspires to an Olympian vision of humanity, but Esmail is working with material built on specificity and interiority. Alam spent pages and pages cataloging the minutiae of his characters’ lives and thoughts, so that when they did and said the things they did and said, we could maybe try to understand them; small gestures and throwaway exchanges came from deep wells of detail and intimacy. Amanda’s brittleness and paranoia felt lived in, as did Clay’s Teflon pliability; their anxiety over their kids gathered force as the calamities mounted. In the novel, George and Ruth were a married couple and much older; their weary vulnerability added to the slow-burning tension.

Again, movie, book, different creatures, different creators. But shorn of all that context for the film, these characters’ behavior doesn’t entirely make sense, and not even this talented cast can make them breathe, especially with such a clunky, overly expository script. Who are these people? Do we care? Should we care? Does the film? As things proceed, we may ungenerously wonder if the writer-director, when he gives Amanda a bizarre opening speech about human striving that ends with her declaring, “I fucking hate people,” isn’t really talking about himself.