Leave the World Behind
Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali headline an implausible but consistently absorbing mystery-thriller with an old-fashioned smirk.
The unknowable: Julia Roberts
Leave the World Behind is a deliciously old-fashioned thriller exposing a modern malaise. Alfred Hitchcock is all over it, from the monochromatic Saul Bass-inspired opening credits, to the Vertigo-like camera angles (out-stripping M.C. Escher at his own game of perspective), to the nerve-jangling score ripped straight out of Bernard Herrmann’s songbook. It’s like Hitchcock uttering a guttural laugh from the grave at our own expense.
We have all become so reliant on our mobile phones – cell phones in the US – that our dependence has become our very vulnerability. But Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts) is leaving that world behind, deciding on a whim to whip her family off for a short “vacay” at a dream house in the woods of Long Island. By the time her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) has woken up in their Brooklyn brownstone, Amanda has already packed and booked the trip. Their children Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) have little say in the matter, but are happy enough glued to their devices in the back of the car. That is until Rose’s tablet freezes as she’s watching the final episode of Friends (you know, ‘The Last One’).
Once there and the Sandford clan has piled out of the car and charged around the massive, high-end rental, other devices stop working. The phones have no signal, the Internet is down and the big-screen TV in the living room states that there is some kind of National Emergency. Stranger still is the arrival of a man and his daughter late in the evening, the former (G.H. Scott, played by Mahershala Ali) in black tie. He declares that the house is his and he wants to stay the night. Amanda doesn’t trust him an inch, although Clay gives him the benefit of the doubt. But there are stranger things afoot, such as a gathering of deer on the back lawn and a cessation of the cicada chorus…
Not all of Sam Esmail’s film makes a lot of sense. Both Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke seem a little old to have a 13-year-old daughter, while G.H.’s discovery of a watch on the beach is pure hokum. We see the timepiece from his POV, although in real life he would have clocked everything else on the sand around him – which we only see when the camera pulls back with a flourish. Sam Esmail is constantly pushing the boundaries of plausibility, so we just have to go along for the ride. Ultimately, Leave the World Behind is a guessing game, one big tease – albeit a very entertaining one. It’s an unlikely vehicle for Julia Roberts (whose Amanda says from the start that, “I fucking hate people”), and is an even more curious co-production between her and her co-executives Barack and Michelle Obama. It would seem to be both a warning and a blackly comic ride, something the director Jordan Peele would have had enormous fun with. But had we believed in the characters more, Esmail could have rustled up a masterpiece.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, Kevin Bacon, Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans, Vanessa Aspillaga.
Dir Sam Esmail, Pro Sam Esmail, Chad Hamilton, Julia Roberts, Lisa Gillan and Marisa Yeres Gill, Ex Pro Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Screenplay Sam Esmail, based on the novel by Rumaan Alam, Ph Tod Campbell, Pro Des Anastasia White, Ed Lisa Lassek, Music Mac Quayle, Costumes Catherine Marie Thomas, Sound Kevin W. Buchholz.
Esmail Corp/Red Om Films/Higher Ground Productions-Netflix.
141 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 8 December 2023. Cert. 15.
