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Leave the World Behind (2023)

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Shyamalan meets Black Mirror in this hugely entertaining, visually inventive apocalyptic thriller with a killer ending

The Very Best

8.2

Movie

United States of America
English, Spanish
Drama, Mystery, Science Fiction, Thriller
2023
SAM ESMAIL
Alexis Rae Forlenza, Charlie Evans, Erica Cho
142 min

TLDR

The irony of Leave the World Behind premiering on Netflix considering *that* ending is certainly something to chew on.

What it's about

When a communications blackout suddenly strikes their luxurious remote vacation, Amanda (Julia Roberts), Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their kids are forced to share the house they rented with its owners (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la), who have returned bearing unnerving news.

The take

The key to what makes this apocalyptic thriller from Mr Robot and Homecoming showrunner Sam Esmail so unnerving is how resolute it is about not taking place in an alternate timeline. Making references to memorable events in recent history and namechecking real brands and cultural touchstones (like Tesla and Friends), Leave the World Behind is uncannily familiar — which, when combined with the film’s meticulous crafting of tension, makes it all the more unsettling.

Though taking place amidst an ambiguous national emergency, the film is largely set in one house — a claustrophobic setting that puts the characters’ self-conceits and prejudices under a microscope and forces them to confront their own impotence in an analog world. If it all sounds a bit “we live in a society,” be assured that Leave the World Behind cleverly manages to avoid the pitfalls of seeming like a bad Black Mirror ripoff by sidestepping expectations and deploying all the atmospheric tools in its arsenal. Withholding key plot and character information to increase our own paranoia means the movie always runs the risk of disappointment when explanations are finally given, but its focus on the human drama and its well-set-up ending ultimately eclipse any niggling frustrations.

What stands out

Crucial to the movie’s gripping effect is its all-too-rare use of the purely visual and aural elements of filmmaking. Tod Campbell's off-kilter cinematography (featuring frequently rotating camerawork and voyeuristic zooms) plus the jarring, jangly score by Mac Quayle set an instantly engrossing tone and magnify all the paranoia onscreen. If you’ve ever seen Esmail’s brilliant show Homecoming, you’ll know just how effective his direction is at wordlessly sowing the seeds of conspiracy — making for an unusually involving and deeply rewarding (if not exactly stress-free) viewing experience.

Comments

The less you know about this film before watching it, the better. The suspense is its only redeemimg feature. The music and cinematography are fantastic but the narrative is ultimately a “what’s in the box” story, and not the surrealist-parable kind that you find yourself pondering months down the line. The treatment of conspiracies is thought-provoking, but things are said and done throughout the movie that go beyond “Makes you think” to “Why are they talking about or doing anything unrelated to different megalaphobic God events happening on the hour every hour.” It was not a good movie to watch. I won’t be returning to this website to look for such movies.

This is phenomenal trash. I was wholly unamused and had to watch it at 1.5x speed to see if it would redeem itself. It did not. Stay Away.

The movie could have been so much better but it relied too much on phony racial differences and plain dumbness, like Clay not being to find the town center which was on the main road.

This movie tries to be clever but ends up a hodgepodge of tried and tested tropes. White people bad, suspicious, exploitative. Black people angry, Hispanic people helpless. It also introduces Obama as a protagonist. It fails miserably in execution and the symbolism seems far fetched and contrived.

This movie tries too hard but achieves too little.
A dense buildup that makes little to no sense, like a short story that was bloated into a full-fledged novel.
It’s still a decent movie, but that high of a score is undeserved, in my opinion.

Don’t watch it. Waste of lifetime.

Worst due to ending

One of the most beautiful movies that I ever watched.

The entire movie, 2+ hours, felt like the buildup/setup that should have been about 30 minutes. Problem is, it never went anywhere. There was no middle or end to the story. Ridiculous.

The very worst. Another cash cow movie.

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