Leave The World Behind

A family vacation is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a second family at the vacation house’s door. These people bring with them news of disconcerting events which may herald the beginning of a country-wide domestic conflict. Isolated and confused, as events grow more frequent and threatening, both families must decide how best to survive the potential crisis, all while grappling with their own place in this collapsing world.

Based on a novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, Leave The World Behind is a film about a disparate group of people coming together in a time of need, and along the way, learning a little bit about themselves… and each other. It was adapted and directed by Sam Esmail, the executive producer of Mr. Robot, a TV show that definitely thought it was about something, but actually wasn’t at all.

Which turns out to be an indication of what to expect here…

Leave the World Behind starts with a bougie white family from Park Slope Brooklyn deciding on a whim to take a vacation up the coast. They book a fancy AirBnB with a huge pool, and then decide to go spend the day at the beach’s trash-strewn shoreline. While they’re there, an oil tanker crashes into the shore, so then the family leaves and goes to Starbucks. Back at the fancy AirBnb, both the WiFi and the TV are out, which is upsetting for the kids, because they can’t use their phones or IPads, so instead, the family has a BBQ. Night falls, and the mellow quiet is disturbed by the owner of the house suddenly knocking at the door, with his college-age daughter in tow.

The pair claim that there’s a blackout in the city, and that some strange things are happening on the road, and that they’re hoping to stay in their house that night too, just in case things get worse. Also, the house’s owners are black, so despite being very bougie themselves, more bougie than the bougie white Park Slope family, this upsets the screeching harridan of a mom.

The house’s owner is pretty rich, he is also connected enough that while he and his daughter were at the Opera that evening, he got a warning from a client who is even more connected than him, a warning that something bad was about to happen. This is why they left the city, just ahead of the blackout and other strange occurrences. Over the next few days, the families soon start hearing rumors about a possible coup, and that cyberattacks are happening all across the country.

Then a few planes fall from the sky.

In short, the game of Jenga that the white couple are playing that first night in the AirBnB while enjoying a few glasses of wine, just before the house’s owner shows up, is a very obvious and telegraphed metaphor.

Especially when it finally collapses.

Throughout the film, there’s definitely an overwhelming feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it quickly becomes apparent that all that tension is nothing but a lot of Dutch angles and discordant piano chords. After a while, it’s obvious that there’s going to be no answers given in this film whatsoever, that it’s actually just the cobbled-together result of a “weird events” brainstorming session, all of which were then used, as the film only get dumber and dumber as things go on, and ultimately adds up to nothing.

Even worse than the frankly incredible amount of Dutch angles that are used in this movie, every concrete clue we do get as to what’s actually happening, every time some alert or tv/radio signal manages to cut through the static, it only happens when none of the characters are present, so only the audience sees or hears any of it. This is not only incredibly hacky, and happens multiple times in the film… Multiple Times!… the fact that these bits of information are all ultimately pointless, and in no way affects the plot at all, is shockingly bad.

I’d call this film the result of multiple drafts all awkwardly welded together, but there doesn’t seem to be any plot threads at odds, or any different story intents, the kind of things that indicate the existence of different versions with different agendas that were then slapped together. Instead, the film is just a series of loosely-connected events happening to the same group of characters.

After watching the film, I have no idea what the repeated “sonic weapon attacks” were even supposed to be the result of, or what the teenage boy could’ve possibly been sick from that would make his teeth fall out, but that he was the only one suffering from it, or what possible medication the Doomsday Prepper neighbor could’ve been stocked up with, that when he then gave it to the boy, it seemed to immediately cure him after only two pills. The film certainly doesn’t know, as again, it offers no explanations at all, except to vaguely link these events together.

Admittedly, these moments, and many of the other moments just like them that fill this film, all happen to heighten the tension, as well as the characters’ confusion, but the problem with this is…

A. There’s no dramatic weight to any of it.

B. There’s no resolution or answer as to why any of it is happening.

C. This film is obviously a lot of sci-fi nonsense, but these type of “Day the World Ended” type stories, especially ones set in the present, are supposed to have events that are of the “grounded in reality” type of sci-fi nonsense, which isn’t what’s happening here.

It’s pretty easy to tell in genre fiction whenever you have an author, a filmmaker, or a creator who’s knows absolutely nothing about the specific topic they’re writing about, or when they’ve given it almost zero thought beyond a general “it’d be cool/scary if…” musing, which is something that happens a lot, especially when a genre gets hot and can be sold easier. The big tell with this film is the way it starts out with “grounded in reality“ sci-fi nonsense, and then quickly ramps up into completely fake “pulled-out-of-their-butt” sci-fi nonsense. On top of that, it’s bad enough when it’s obvious that the creators have no idea this is happening, but it’s even worse when the creators are assuming no one else will possibly notice. This is indicative of a shitty mixture of arrogance and a lack of talent and ability.

Which is obviously what we’re dealing with here, as this is a film of hollow spectacle, ultimately about nothing, that goes nowhere, makes no sense, and eventually just ends.

And not soon enough at that.

Plus, there’s also a whole bunch of “animals acting weird as if they’re trying to communicate with us” moments that seem like they’re supposed to mean something, but turns out to be even more meaningless nonsense that leads nowhere, and makes no sense from any angle at all. I don’t even know what to make of the multiple scenes in this film of the characters ogling at a group of animals acting weird and making a lot of eye contact with the humans. It’s meaningless, just… a bunch of disconnected nonsense.

I did like how the self-driving function of Teslas was used to turn them into a wildly dangerous pieces of shit, but that’s really the film’s one bright side. Otherwise, Leave the World Behind squanders a great cast, and a lot of early potential, as it struggles to come up with any real stakes to accompany the armload of random turmoil this film pretends is a complete story.

The most annoying thing about this film is that while none of the characters are completely wrong when it comes to their oft-stated worldviews, whether it’s a poor view of society, or a desire to help people who need it because it’s the right thing to do, or the need to recognize that sometimes you have to be the bad guy and cut people off if they’re only going to drag you down, or the fact that we’re all that we’ve got, that we’re all in this together… whatever soliloquy a specific character is given to illustrate their core characteristic with, the film is intent on presenting each one of them all as equally wrong. This is the film making a “bold” statement on modern day society, but from a very “oh so reasonable” and “both sides are bad” Centrist point of view, which isn’t just cowardly bullshit, it’s fucking exhausting to listen to.

It gets even worse, when you realize that the film’s only real affirmative stance it takes on how it presents the characters is how all the people with their cellphones and their internets and their food delivery services are nothing but big stupid helpless babes in the woods, and the Doomsday Prepper guy, with his xenophobic conspiracy theories and his civil war ideals, is the one who was actually right all along…

That’s a very telling detail about the creators, especially once you’ve actually watched the film, and it’s not telling me anything good.

The cherry on top of this whole shitcake failure of a film is the way the youngest child’s only defining feature is her all-consuming obsession with the tv show Friends. When the credits role on this last beat, after a bunch of nonsense and zero answers, the whole thing just ends up feeling like nothing more than an angry screed from an aging and wealthy dude who’s been feeling like this changing world isn’t prioritizing him anymore, at least, not in the way he thinks it should be.

This is a bad and stupid film.