Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Sam Esmail
Starring: Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Myha'la,
Charlie Evans, Farrah Mackenzie, Kevin Bacon
Streaming services like to think of themselves as representing the future
of movies yet they continually greenlight movies that are a decade or two
behind the cultural curve. Every month Netflix, Prime Video or Apple TV+
gives us some new variation of the 2005 Doug Liman spy comedy
Mr & Mrs Smith, and we're even getting a TV series remake of that film soon. Streamers
just can't get enough of comedies about suburbanites who just happen to live
secret lives as spies and assassins, most of which star Gal Gadot. Who is
asking for these movies in 2023? Another dated concept streamers love is the
sort of apocalyptic thriller that was popular in the years after 9/11
leading up to the uncertainty of 2012. Netflix claims that their most viewed
original movie is the Sandra Bullock headlined apocalyptic thriller
Bird Box. Sam Esmail's Leave the World Behind, adapted from the novel by Rumaan Alam, is the latest Netflix production to plough this field.
Esmail has snagged an impressive cast, with Julia Roberts and
Ethan Hawke playing Amanda and Clay, a middle class couple who decide
to get away from New York for a break with their kids, Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans). Renting a plush upscale Air BnB near
the beach, they find the WiFi is down, which plays havoc with Farrah's plan
to stream the final episode of Friends (which just happens to
be the most viewed show on Netflix). At the beach they have an unsettling
experience when a giant oil tanker runs aground, a sequence that would be
eerily effective were it not for some terrible compositing effects.
Returning to their rental home they find that their cellphone networks are
down, along with all TV channels.
That night Amanda and Clay are disturbed by the arrival of an
African-American father and daughter - G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth
(Myha'la) - clad in dinner outifts. G.H. claims he's the owner of the
home, an idea the Karen-esque Amanda struggles to buy into, and that he
wishes to stay the night with his daughter while they figure out what's
going on. Amanda doesn't like the idea but the chilled out Clay guilt trips
her into agreeing.
This isn't so much the set-up for some ensuing human conflict but rather
the sum total of any potential friction between the two couples, who get
along quite well once they realise they're in the midst of some sort of
apocalyptic event. There's no Night of the Living Dead style
quarreling over how best to handle the situation, and none of that film's
unspoken but tangible racial tension. I didn't buy Amanda's Karen persona as
she seems like exactly the sort of middle class white woman who would fawn
over a well-spoken black man in a dinner jacket. Middle class white people
don't hate black people per se, they just hate black people who refuse to
conform to their standards (this movie is incidentally executive produced by
Barack Obama, who is exactly the sort of black man middle class white folks
adore).
With no real conflict between the leads, it's a surprise that the threat
from outside is never established. We get the obligatory scene of a downed
plane - a staple of these movies ever since Spielberg's
War of the Worlds adaptation, still the best of the 21st
century's apocalyptic thrillers - and there's a clever scene in which dozens
of self-driven cars crash into one another, but there's never any
discernible threat posed to our protagonists. The movie refuses to indulge
who or what is responsible for the chaos, save for leaflets dropped from a
plane that read "Death to America" written in Arabic (which, considering the
involvement of a former American president, comes off as decidedly tone
deaf). After two hours of waiting for something to happen,
Kevin Bacon pops up in the Tim Robbins
War of the Worlds role, but any potentially tense subplot
fails to materialise. A set-piece involving a herd of CG deer is unintentionally amusing, recalling the New Zealand horror-comedy Black Sheep.
Leave the World Behind could be placed in a time capsule to
represent the worst aspects of made for streaming movies of the early 20th
century. It looks like a TV show rather than a movie; it's glacially paced
and in bad need of some judicial editing; it's 15 years behind the cultural
zeitgeist; and in its running Friends gag it features
undisguised promotion for other "content" available on the network. The
latter does play into an admittedly subversive ending that suggests
streaming ultimately can't compete with owning physical media.
