‘Leave the World Behind’ Review: It’s the End of the World, I Guess
Alissa Wilkinson www.nytimes.com alissa-wilkinson
This film about the apocalypse, directed by Sam Esmail and adapted from Rumaan Alam’s novel, leaves little room for imagination.
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The haunting cleverness of Rumaan Alam’s novel “Leave the World Behind” — published in 2020, when every novel about the apocalypse felt uncannily prophetic — comes in what it doesn’t say. For the whole book, you’re expecting to find out what’s caused the catastrophe that is just beginning to reach the main characters, New Yorkers who just happen to be vacationing out in the sticks when things start going wrong. And then, tensions stretched to the breaking point, the book thwarts all expectations, leaving behind a feeling of lingering unease.

The film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by the “Mr. Robot” creator Sam Esmail, also leaves behind lingering unease, but for entirely different reasons. In this rendition of the story, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as Amanda and Clay Sandford, an advertising executive and her English and media studies professor husband, who live a comfortable but not extravagant life in their Brooklyn home. (He says it’s in Sunset Park; she says it’s in Park Slope; that’s a clarifying character detail, if you know the geography.)

Prompted by her annoyance with humanity, Amanda, a prickly misanthrope, rents a house to which she, Clay and their teenagers decamp. They wish, as the listing promised, to “leave the world behind.” (As a New Yorker, I have to pause on this house for a second, because somehow it’s in the woods, only reachable by a multi-hour drive and remote enough that cellular service is extremely spotty, but the Manhattan skyline seems closer from the yard than it does when you’re in, like, Brooklyn Heights. I don’t know.)

Anyhow, the house is beautiful and they’re happy for a few hours until they go to the beach, where something so bizarre happens that I, who am not made of such strong stuff as them apparently, would have headed back to my Sunset Park (Slope) home immediately. Instead they go back to the house and seem to shake it off, for a while — until a man (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter (Myha’la) show up on the doorstep, claiming that this is their house, and they’re so sorry, but there’s a blackout in the city and can they please stay here tonight?

It soon becomes clear there’s more than a blackout, but this is where the movie really goes awry. Here is the thing about stories about the apocalypse: What they reveal, most of all, is what we think will actually end the world. What works in the novel is this question is left open, a blank space for the reader to fill with their own conjecture. Thus the reader discovers something about themselves, maybe indulges in a little self-examination, without getting caught up in the plausibility of this particular catastrophe.

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