In the spur of the moment, Amanda (Julia Roberts) books a vacation for her family; husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie).  Their enjoyment of the beach is cut short when an oil liner runs ashore, and as the day continues back at the rental house, things become even stranger. Unable to connect to wifi, it is an early night for the family whose peace is interrupted by a knock on the door from G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), the owners of the home, who inform the vacationers that the internet outage is part of a larger power cris that has driven the nation to a halt. 

Sam Esmail adapts Rumaan Alam’s novel, Leave the World Behind for Netflix.  The film opened the AFI Festival before embarking on a limited theatrical run and ultimately ending up on the streaming platform.  At 138 minutes, Esmail weaves a confounding narrative with plenty of mystery while also tapping into many of the modern anxieties brought about by the pandemic and the meteoric rise of society’s dependency on technology.  With a resume weighted heavily towards television and a clear affinity for thrillers, Leave the World Behind, in its 5-chapter structure, feels totally within Esmail’s wheelhouse, yet there are some major choices made late in the film that seem to undermine the mystery that the story is founded upon. 

The film starts quickly with Amanda declaring that the family is to pack their bags and head out on their vacation.  Cinematographer Tod Campbell utilizes some camera tricks that give the film an instantly unsettling and disorienting quality to it, reminiscent of the toppling and oscillating camera favored by Ari Aster.  It all slowly increases the unspecified tension of the film which Esmail is building towards, creating a fear of the unknown in audiences, but it is not until the family returns to the rental home looking for information about the beached ship that cut short their time in the surf that the film’s focus begins to come into view.  With no wifi and no cellular data, the family begins to feel isolated and alone, cut off from the rest of the world. 

A knock at the door brings two strangers into their lives, G.H. and Ruth, who claim to have been on their way home from the symphony when they decided instead of returning to the city, they will seek refuge at their rental home.  Thematically, and now narratively, the film begins to call back to Knock at the Cabin (2023), an apocalyptic piece by M. Night Shyamalan, a director whose style and tone Esmail seems to be channeling in his own work.  Shyamalan’s almost 40-minute shorter piece has different goals in mind, but the two are very much in conversation as they examine a family unit under the isolated duress of a collapsing outside world.  While G.H. and Ruth do add a good bit of tangible tension to the film, their connection to the plot is hinted at far more than their actual direct involvement.  Entering under suspicious circumstances for both cast and audiences, G.H.’s every word – and every annoyed shrug from Ruth – are intently scrutinized, and as they talk through the events that transpired in the basement guest room, we begin to think they know more than they are letting on. 

It is not until late in the film that G.H. begins to shed some light on the situation in a conversation with Amanda about his line of work; a fund manager for powerful military contractors.  The strange occurrences – communication and internet satellites going down, a piercing sound – it was all part of a military strategy, though if this is a foreign or domestic attack is left unclear, designed to destabilize a nation and incite civil unrest.  Capitalism at its finest; the cheapest road to war.  A more nuanced script would have examined the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the middle managers of society with enough money and connections to be insulated to a point, but ultimately, expendable, but the powers that be.  A more nuanced script would also examine the rifts such an attack would open up between the regular folk who are already experiencing an ideological schism.  It attempts to do so, painting Danny (Kevin Bacon), a conspiracy-driven neighbor as a beguiling character, but given today’s political climate, the film, from a marketing standpoint, wisely steers away from this facet, but from a narrative standpoint, completely neuters its thesis by refusing to engage in the politics of the story which it set up. 

That shyness may be due to the fact that Leave the World Behind has a different endgame in mind.  While Clay is frustrated that he cannot use his GPS and Archie is annoyed that he cannot access the internet before bed, Rose’s crucible comes in the form of being left hanging after finishing the penultimate episode of Friends and is unable to connect her iPad to stream the final episode.  As the world continues to fall apart and Rose’s family stresses their disconnection from the internet, they find relief in the massive doomsday bunker beneath one of the houses in G.H.’s neighborhood.  Stocked shelves with water and various snacks line the walls, but what catches Rose’s attention is the previous owner’s physical media collection, and sitting there like the holy grail is a DVD box set of the final season of Friends.  The final sequence plays out like a punch line as her finger passes over the “Netflix” short key on the remote to hit “Play” to finally see what happens to Ross and Rachel.  Esmail had been carefully building this comic ode to physical media by framing the young girl’s binging withdrawal as more of a nuisance symptom of the constantly online generation than a key to understanding the film, but as sharp-witted as this finale is, it just highlights the emptiness of the thriller that the film is clearly trying to be. 

So many of the intriguing elements of the film are left loose, not open-ended and ambiguous, but just extra puzzle pieces the audience has to sort through when the credits roll.  Some explanation can be inferred, such as the strange behavior of the wildlife being attributed to the sonic attacks, or the crashing planes due to the failing navigation systems, but that almost every peculiar occurrence needs to be teased out by the audience makes the script feel weak and not well thought out.  A little more egregious of a sin in how G.H. and Ruth are framed throughout yet have so little direct impact on the ending, but the biggest flaw is the small hunting cabin in the woods that is visited twice, commented on by the characters, but ultimately is nothing more than just another location that had to be scouted and decorated.   

In its totality, there is no denying that Esmail is great at building tension, but he absolutely fails at delivering that punch in the final act.  Crying about plot holes does not really allow one to engage with the film on a thematic or meaningful level, but when all these ideas are set up and almost none of them are capitalized on, it’s very difficult to engage with the film on any level except one that is so superficial.  It plays out like a tone poem of modern anxiety more than a calculated thriller, though the film was still carefully assembled because it is so effective at setting the uneasy tone.  The film is still empty, though. It is easy to leave audiences feeling uncomfortable and uneasy through a parade of upsetting events, but since it does not connect to anything truly larger, and Esmail seems to be purposefully withholding answers – or he himself is dumbfounded on how these events all become a singular experience – he ends up wasting his audiences time with further frustration given his lack of brevity.