If you thought the family in The Impossible endured a spoiled holiday, think again. The Sandford family’s impromptu getaway encounters apocalyptic rumblings in Leave the World Behind. Big waves are the least of their problems. Things get off to a rocky start when Amanda (Julia Roberts) books a luxury home for a vacay and then her kids, Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie), encounter internet problems on the drive up. Spotty connections could be behind the epic disaster that nearly kills them shortly after arriving. They’re lounging on the beach when an oil tanker careens into the shore. Nobody can explain why the boat ploughed headlong into land. Worse, nobody can use their phones to discover why. The Sandfords are roughing it like a family camping off grid.
That might sound cheeky, but writer/director Sam Esmail, adapting Rumaan Alam’s novel, hammers the point home hard and frequently: people are too reliant on technology these days. Amanda’s husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke) can’t get the TV to work so that Rose can watch the very last episode of Friends amid her recent binge-watching of ’90s’ classics.
The Sandfords’ First Word Problems take another twist, however, when a man named George (Mahershala Ali) appears at the door in the middle of the night. He claims to be the house’s owner. He knows all the details about Amanda’s booking, and seems familiar with the giant home that Amanda insinuates is beyond his means. But George doubles down on the stranger danger factor with an odd request: he wants to know if he and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la) can spend the night after escaping a blackout in the city. Clay obliges, Amanda freaks out.
Here Come the Disasters!
Concerns that George and Ruth plan to murder the Sandfords in their beds fade (somewhat) when Amanda awakens the next morning. She isn’t dead. (Surprise!) Nor are Clay and the kids. (Fair!) However, there’s a flurry of notification on her phone: apparently terrorists are behind a cyber-attack. George’s story of the blackout seems to check out.
Things then become stranger and eerier by the minute. Airplanes fall from the sky. Deer lurk cautiously around the yard. Flyers proclaiming the end of America flutter down like rain. Anything seemingly can happen in this idyllic community and nobody is safe.
Roberts guides the suspension of disbelief as Amanda offers the main set of eyes through which one sees the disaster. Playing somewhat against type as an edgy Karen, Roberts eschews the kind of picture-perfect mother who usually lends sentimental beats to a disaster film. Instead, Leave the World Behind is a disaster movie that inspires audiences to think, rather than feel. It helps, too, that Ali’s cool and collected George provides something of a foil. His need to prove himself complicates one’s sympathy for Amanda and her “me first” attitude.
Leave the World Behind genuinely leaves a viewer guessing as the off-kilter tension rises. The camera moves around George’s home like an all-seeing eye. Dizzying shots signal twists of fate and shifts in the order of things, while some bravura special effects work allows the camera to seamlessly traverse walls and floors in the elaborate abode. Besides offering some impressive “one take” sequences stitched together with digital editing and VFX, the all-seeing eye adds an unnerving perspective as technology becomes a threat to the families’ existence.
Echoes of Recent Trauma
Leave the World Behind also offers one doozy of an action sequence after another to punch up the escalating tension. Besides the showpiece with the aforementioned oil tanker, Esmail and the VFX crew create epic plane crashes and waves. Especially exciting is a white-knuckler car sequence that rivals the iconic one-take wonder from Children of Men. The film puts the family through a perilous ride, which must have cost a fortune in insurance with all the actors in a rigged car that navigates errant Teslas barrelling at them full speed. The car scene is a technical coup that sees the actors, cinematographer, and VFX crew work harmoniously to create an adrenaline-pumping showpiece.
At the same time, the moments of lingering dread in which the families assess their situation prove doubly unnerving. While Alam’s novel was published in 2020, the adaptation carries echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic that transfixed families with uncertainty, paranoia, and a crippling sense of isolation. But Rose’s need for comfort viewing, her fixation on finding closure with Friends’ happy ending, adds to the relatable resonance of this disaster show. Leave the World Behind doesn’t seem too far out of the ordinary in a post-2020 world and the ways in which we survived it.
The terrifying events that unite these two families can’t be explained, either, so the air of unease simmers throughout the vacation. Whether they’re natural disasters, freak accidents, or attacks by enemy aliens doesn’t really matter. No rational explanation can soothe the anxiety, especially since Rose could die without knowing how Friends ends. (And, perhaps the major fault of the film is that everybody talks through the possible scenarios. At. Such. Length.) Oscillating somewhere between a supernatural thriller, a disaster movie, a horror flick, and a family drama, Leave the World Behind is a shape-shifting, nerve-wracking ride that inspires edge-of-your-seat viewing.