I know I’m screwed. I’ve made a conscious choice to be a big city community person. So in the event the world starts to implode on itself, I’m gonna be one of the first to go, as all my skills are built for a large peaceful society. Leave the World Behind is the latest glimpse of what the the start of that chaos looks like. It could be a flash before my eyes as I die; if it is, tell everyone I was a nice guy. And “Chicago forever!”
Frustrated with her high stress NYC job and people in general, Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts) makes a split second decision to take her family on vacation to Long Island. So Amanda, husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and kids Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) enjoy a few days of R&R out in the countryside. The vacay completely changes one night though, when a late night knock at the door brings GH Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) to the AirBnB. The Scotts claim they own the house and ask to stay there, which Clay seems on board with, but Amanda is more skeptical, as George’s reasoning is very suspicious to her. And as she says, she “f*cking hates people.”
Boy is Leave the World Behind really trying to tackle a lot of stuff. As the world begins its crumble, writer/director Sam Esmail takes us on a long, complex journey through these people and all of the things they are worried about. The director is best here at building tension, starting from GH’s knock at the door. At first I thought Esmail the Mr. Robot guy would just be doing a lot of claustrophobic psychological warfare. He does do that initially, with great nighttime effect. But with that Netflix money, he really goes big with his setpieces. There’s 3 really harrowing action sequences that had me on the edge of my seat. The slow escalations are Shyamalan esque, with dread slowly creeping in with the score letting you know something’s afoot. And in the best sequences, we’re cross cutting between various characters each inside their own little nightmare scenarios, getting bigger and scarier with each passing minute. For basically a movie in one house and the neighboring small secluded community, Sam Esmail makes Leave the World Behind as big in scope and scale as the titular statement.
Even though he gets the setpieces right, Esmail is so so on his TV to movie dialogue transition. Because of that big scope, there’s a lot of big discussions and big ideas for our characters to hash out between each other. But the Big 3 means Leave the World Behind has to get it’s butt in gear quickly, meaning plot is always moving forward at a racecar pace. Meaning: a lot of the conversations are built around a point Esmail wants to make, but for time’s sake, after about 5 minutes, one of the characters says the theme of the conversation and a conclusion, and we move on. While this directness is helpful to distracted audience members, it comes off pretty awkward an unnatural every 5 minutes someone says “You got me, I really am bad at this [insert damning characteristic or societal flaw], but [I’m gonna fix it/we’ve got to be better].” Even world class Oscar nominees/winners like Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, and Mahershala Ali can’t make all of Leave the World Behind work. The herky jerky dialogue stitched between the big set pieces makes the whole movie frustratingly brilliant or stitled moment to moment, and never quite hits movie nirvana that Esmail and the cast try to get to.
But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of meat on the bone. Leave the World Behind will definitely fire some of those synapses, and get your mind racing and hopefully start some, um, charged conversations with your family members. Just a reminder though: the Obamas are producers on this one, so your Pizzagate MyPillow third cousin is going to dismiss everything this movie has to say. Oh well, at least you can talk about Sound of Freedom then?