In a beautiful bedroom in Brooklyn, a woman packs a suitcase. The bedroom is blue and large; the people who sleep in it, Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke), obviously don’t do too poorly for themselves. But neither are they the kind of wealthy that results in those pristine, spare, Pottery Barn-like spaces where everything personal is hidden away.
With their two kids, Amanda and Clay depart the city for a Long Island getaway. The house they pull up to is the space of the obviously wealthy: elegant, sleek, but still with hints of warmth. There’s a pool; there’s an even bigger bedroom with a moody piece of art on the wall behind the bed. Teenage Archie (Charlie Evans) just wants to know how far it is to the town where a girl he likes is staying. Young Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) just wants to keep watching Friends on her iPad.
And then, gradually, the world falls apart.
Leave the World Behind is based on Rumaan Alam’s novel, which came out in 2020, a year in which people were certainly left behind by the world. Those of us who were lucky read it while staying home, masking up, and waiting—either for things to “return to normal,” or, if we were really optimistic, for life to return in some improved form. The book was disconcerting, slippery, and pointed, peering into the psyches of its characters, digging into their racism and class anxiety.
Leave the World Behind, the movie, is a different beast, a Rorschach blot of a film that might be about class and race; it might be about isolationism; it might be about hackers and cybersecurity (and the untrustworthiness of self-driving Teslas); it might be about parents and children and uncrossable chasms; it might be about preppers and the end of the world; it might be about how finding something you care about, no matter how unlikely, will help you deal. It is probably about all of those things, but people will, of course, see different things in it.
What it is, inarguably, is a Sam Esmail film. Esmail created the brilliant series Mr. Robot, which I still believe is criminally underwatched, simply because I believe probably everyone should watch it. It is a story about a hacker; it is a story about a person with deeply rooted problems; it is a story about family and class and power; it is a story about the shadowy cabal that maybe runs the world, which makes it also a story about capitalism and fear and survival.
Early in Leave the World Behind, Amanda opens her laptop, which sports not an Apple logo but an E, for E Corp, a central entity in Mr. Robot. That show’s troubled hacker, Elliot (Rami Malek) refers to it as Evil Corp. It runs everything, until it doesn’t. And in this film, everything runs, until it doesn’t. A giant oil tanker, the White Lion, beaches itself right in front of the disbelieving family. (Poor Rose is the only one who sees what’s happening. Poor Rose is us.) The internet goes down. The TV doesn’t work. No one has cell service. There might be an alarming number of deer in the woods, but everyone is fine, technically.
Then comes a late-night knock at the door.
This, in Alam’s novel, is where the sharpest stress factor appears. The problem is less the vague end of the world than the tension between Clay and Amanda and the two people standing on the stoop, who are Black, and whose home it is. There is a blackout in the city, and they thought it best to come home. In the book, this is a man and his wife; in the movie, it’s a man, G.H. (Mahershala Ali, compelling and smooth) and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la, radiating skepticism). The lines are drawn as soon as Amanda says, in a brittle voice, “This is … your house?” Everyone tenses. She has said the unsayable, and it will color every interaction the families have from then on.
Esmail, the film’s writer and director, unspools everything slowly, terribly, and calmly. Without the access to everyone’s mind that a novel provides, the film can’t fully reveal their secret thoughts, their hidden -isms, the personal ways the two families dance around each other and the unthinkable, unknowable happenings in the world. Some parts remain: Clay absolutely fails a woman who he meets on the side of the road. He can’t understand Spanish, and he can’t bring himself to just open his car to her. Amanda continues airing her racist doubts to Clay, and spars with Ruth, who is most willing to say what the adults are thinking but generally not saying. (In one extremely enjoyable bit of dialogue, she pinpoints with laser accuracy the problem with every single member of the Sandford family.)
But what primarily fills the space is dread. A terrible noise happens. Animals behave strangely. It rains a lot. A drone drops flyers the color of blood. I don’t want to tell you all the things that go wrong, but I also don’t need to. You can guess. The world has gone awry in front of us, in reality and on screens, for so long. The Road. Knock at the Cabin. Every natural disaster movie ever made. Independence Day. We are steeped in apocalyptic images, but rarely are they so plain, so disconcertingly ordinary, as the terrible not-knowing that Esmail depicts here. These people are well-off, privileged, comfortable, and utterly at a loss. What would you do if you lost all your sources of information? What would you assume? Who would you ask for information—who do you think would have it?
Clay and Amanda have no answers. G.H. has clients whose worlds are even more elevated, more rarified, than his own, and he tells terrible, useful stories about them. Maybe what he explains is what’s happening. Maybe not. He describes terrifying, believable scenarios, and they offer just enough to keep this story moving while everyone in it falls apart.
But they do so with humor, with pathos, with humanity, even when they’re assholes, even when they’re mean. The cast is across-the-board excellent: Hawke flails; Roberts seems in an angry sort of stalemate with herself; Ali is magnetic; and Myha’la simmers with anger that masks a real sense of loss. They come together and separate in unexpected combinations: Amanda and G.H. have a beautiful, awkward dance party. Rose’s iPad remains improbably locked on the start of the Friends series finale, even in the middle of the night. Clay accepts an ill-advised offer from Ruth. Archie tries to masturbate. And Rose grows more desperate to find out what happens with Ross and Rachel.
The Friends through-line in this film is possibly my favorite thing about it. This movie is sleek, precise, occasionally prone to overzealous camera spins and disconcerting angles, some of which are more effective than others. It’s a classy apocalypse, one that might come from a plethora of forces (or all of them at once). It plays with uncertainty and dread, and refuses to be either a film about people being terrible to each other in a crisis, or a story about people coming together in a crisis. It sits with the uncertainty between those things: the world ends but continues. People freak out but are still themselves. No one knows what’s next. Sometimes, it’s very funny. Toward the end it offers one image of destruction that will not get out of my head.
And it has this perfect thread about Friends. Another viewer might see it as mocking: The world’s ending, and this tween just wants to see what happens on her favorite TV series? Spoiled! Heartless! Privileged! The ultimate in toxic self-care! She’s more invested in her stories than her family!
Maybe. Or maybe it’s a reminder that there is value in caring about things. Rose keeps going, keeps her lonely footing, because she cares about something outside of herself. Is it tragic that she cares about Friends and not her family? Maybe, but hey, have you ever been thirteen?
Friends is, yes, a blockbuster TV series from twenty years ago. But it is also a story about a group of people who stick together, who stand by one another throughout their own tumultuous lives. It’s a show that clicked for thousands upon thousands of viewers—up to and including this kid who doesn’t even know the term “rerun.” The power of her desire to see this story through to its end leads to one of the film’s most delightful scenes; the fact that it’s also a scene supporting the value of physical media is just frosting on the apocalyptic cupcake.
Leave the World Behind is now streaming on Netflix.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Bluesky.
