"Apocalypse in Shreds: 'Leave the World Behind' Uniquely Mincemeats the End Times"

Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind takes the characters and incidents of Alam’s novel and situates them inside a more pronounced, though not particularly convincing, apocalyptic thriller. Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke) are a well-to-do Brooklyn couple who’ve rented a vacation house in a rural enclave outside of New York City with their two teenage kids. Not long after they arrive, however, certain unnerving incidents begin to occur, most notably a massive tanker running aground on a crowded beach. One night, a man in a black tie, George (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), arrive and ask to be let in. They are, it turns out, the owners of the property and have driven all the way out here after the city was plunged into a blackout. The casual, go-along-to-get-along Clay is happy to let them in, but the anxious, vaguely Karen-y Amanda is immediately suspicious of the two African Americans.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity. If Alam’s novel is about all the awkward ways these two families collide and cohere, Esmail’s film at first seems to be about the opposite. He separates them, sending them off to discover crazy scenes of the end times on their own: planes falling from the sky, ominous red leaflets gathering in the sky like pestilential clouds. Maybe the point is that every person suffers their own Armageddon. The fragmentation of experiences, the inability to see anything as a whole, is perhaps meant to speak to our fractured, distracted psyches. But these characters remain stick figures, mere avatars placed in neato disaster sequences instead of humans experiencing an unspeakable horror. Even when they start to bond later in the film, through awkward monologues and old pop records, we never feel like we’re there with them. It’s too little, too late, and not very good to begin with.

Still, the film might have worked had the apocalyptic visions presented onscreen been interesting, or terrifying, or even convincing. (There are, after all, plenty of good disaster movies with lousy characters and even worse dialogue.) But Esmail uses the story’s ambiguity almost like a get-out-of-jail-free card, piling on the weird events without actually telling us what’s happening. He half-asses it, in other words. This feels more like a collection of cool ideas the writer-director jotted down and collected in a box rather than scenes that belong to the same emotional and consequential continuum. (There are some nice bits nevertheless: An endless traffic jam of driverless Teslas on Auto-pilot driving into each other is an inspired idea that could one day show up in a better movie.)