It is not a particularly subtle moral conundrum: Is the arrival of the black property owner nefarious or innocent? Is Roberts’ character racist or is there something very peculiar about the owners showing up late at night to stay at a house they’ve rented out to strangers? It is a good set-up for a film that seeks to have the audience guessing what exactly is going on in this world almost for its entirety.
Directed by Sam Esmail (Mr Robot), who also adapted the screenplay, the film pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock thrillers with its very deliberate cinematography - dolly zooms and disorienting camera movement juxtaposed against static imagery - an unnerving score and regular departures from a naturalistic editing style. As with Hitchcock, there’s an unrelenting eeriness and rising tension throughout, broken periodically by humour. I particularly enjoyed the existential crisis of the 13-year-old daughter who realises, with no internet and a foreboding uncertainty, she may never see the final episode of Friends.
Perhaps because the work we do as writers and critics feels very vulnerable to an AI takeover, that was where my mind went first when trying to figure out what was happening in this world where all communication systems are down, self-driving vehicles are blocking highways, planes are falling from the sky and oil tankers are running aground.
But Leave the World Behind is not an AI apocalypse film - there are many more possibilities for what is happening to these people that are much darker than a simple robot takeover - and that’s what makes it interesting and frankly, for me, fairly anxiety-inducing.
Despite some, at times, over-written dialogue, the performances are excellent across the board - Ali, Myha’la, Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon are all great.
The film ends with a few too many unanswered questions for my liking and I’m not sure it delivers fully on its premise, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed watching this film - even if the main takeaway was: “We’re all going to destroy each other and there’s nothing we can do about it”.
HE SAW
The first movie to star Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts was the 1990 hit Flatliners, about a bunch of medical students who decide to see what it is like being dead. It turns out that the moral of the story is, as it almost always is in Hollywood: Be better.
Flash forward: It is 33 years later, and Bacon and Roberts are back together as part of the cast of an apocalyptic thriller, a genre that, given our pre-apocalyptic present, you would expect to be no longer commercially viable, killed by Hollywood fat cats and slapped with a DNR.
The story runs thus: A family is having a nice time at their rural holiday rental when the putative owners turn up, having nowhere to stay because of a mysterious crisis. The holidaymakers are split over whether to let the “owners” in.
Is this because one of them is racist? Who owns what? What is property anyway? This is what the movie is about: The fragile underpinnings of our agreement to live by a certain set of rules that could be undermined at any time.
Leave the World Behind comes with the standard, crowd-pleasing, escalatory beats of the disaster movie: Small things going wrong (power outage, phones not working); medium things going wrong (animals behaving weirdly, oil tanker behaving weirdly, obligatory plane crash); everything going wrong (an out-of-control fleet of self-driving Teslas).
However, its moral complexity and refusal of easy answers elevate it far beyond your standard disaster flick. This helps make it a good film, but it’s still not a great one.
The movie is based on a bestselling book of the same name that was written prior to the great Covid pandemic, released during its dark early days and turned into a film after the worst of it had passed.
In other words, when author Rumaan Alam was writing the book, he did not have first-hand experience of how society would react to an existential crisis, but when Sam Esmail was making the film, he did.
As we now know, some of us will work together for the common good, some of us will seek to save ourselves, and both groups will claim they’re the former and the other is the latter.
It is interesting that the movie doesn’t incorporate this knowledge (or any other Covid-related lessons ) to diverge thematically from the book – interesting but not surprising.
In these times in which we’re so wildly divided, for a filmmaker to suggest one side has it right and the other has it wrong is too big a risk. The morally defunct buy movie tickets too.
Leave the World Behind is in cinemas now and streaming on Netflix from Friday.
