After spending the best part of a decade creating surreal and paranoid TV sci-fi, Sam Esmail makes his first film since 2014’s little-seen Comet with Leave the World Behind, a – would you know it? – surreal and paranoid sci-fi that boasts a murderer’s row of talent. With Esmail himself – a big name now thanks to the success of Mr Robot – both writing and directing, he’s also managed to wrangle Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon into his star-studded cast while, perhaps most remarkably, he counts the Obamas as executive producers. It’s a headline-grabbing collection of celebs, though the end product is sadly less than the sum of its parts, an intermittently thrilling end-of-days mystery that takes way too long to resolve and ends on a duff note.
Adapting the novel by Rumaan Alam, Esmail gets into the initial action quickly as New York couple Amanda (Roberts) and Clay (Hawke) pack their bags for a spontaneous mini-vacation with their teenage kids at an isolated Long Island house, surrounded by nature. Their peace is broken swiftly, though, when a trip to the beach ends with an oil tanker crashing into the shoreline, followed by the deadening of all phone signals and the arrival of the house’s owner GH (Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), who bear grim tidings of a blackout in the city.
From here, the time is essentially split between a deepening of the mystery, ratcheting up the stakes to eventual possible doomsday levels, and the attempts of the two families to grow to trust one another – difficult given that Amanda and Ruth are each incredibly standoffish and because GH seems to know more than he’s letting on. When Esmail just lets the bizarre quasi-apocalypse roll, Leave the World Behind is great fun, packed with ominous incidents, hazy clues, and a recurring herd of deer that only gets bigger and meaner looking as the story goes on.
Standout scenes, like a drone dropping thousands of Arabic war propaganda leaflets or a disturbing sonic attack that has some really grisly aftereffects, set the mind racing, while the enforced isolation (all the roads are blocked by auto-driving cars that keep crashing themselves) gets the blood pumping, aided by lurching, woozy camerawork. There’s a version of Leave the World Behind that runs at a neat 100 minutes, and that version is likely fantastic, but, unfortunately, there’s a lot of padding in the nearly 140 minutes that it actually takes to wrap up.
The interpersonal stuff is much weaker than the impending apocalypse, with drab dialogue and cliched monologues that even this starry cast struggle to breathe much life into, though Bacon does bring some zing when he pops up as a vindicated ‘prepper’. It mostly just drags things out and saps tension, making the eventual damp squib of an ending much less forgivable. Leave the World Behind, essentially, gives itself three obvious ways to land and then picks, by far, the most boring one, technically answering all its questions but in a way that completely lacks the emotional oomph of the similarly-themed Knock at the Cabin from earlier this year.
Comparisons to Shyamalan’s film are inevitable – they even share imagery of planes simply falling out of the sky while an isolated family unit looks on in powerless horror – but they do nothing to flatter Leave the World Behind, which is less exciting, bold, and visually striking than its spiritual predecessor. Though the ride can certainly be an exciting one, the problem with making a 140-minute mystery box movie is that you really have to give it a juicy centre – by the time you finish unwrapping Leave the World Behind, it all just feels a bit empty.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 