December 11, 2023 · Watch the official trailer
Movies nowadays try to bring out the biggest version of whatever scenario they are showcasing on screen.
If it’s a film about war, the battles are long, epic, and bombastic. If it’s a romantic drama, the gestures are immensely grand and unrealistic. As “Spinal Tap” might say, everything is always cranked up to an 11.
For director Sam Esmail’s first major film project after finding success with television’s “Mr. Robot,” his adaptation of the 2020 Rumaan Alan novel “Leave The World Behind” is exceptionally small for an apocalyptic time psychological thriller.
The film stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple who take their teenage kids on vacation to a suburban AIrBnB when a cyberattack knocks out all technology and forces the family to come face to face with two strangers and the potential of an ending world.
From an acting standpoint, the film is relatively straight forward with an ensemble cast that work better in tandem than individually.
Any film led by an A-lister with the talents of Roberts is certain to not lack solid character work and her Amanda is an ardent skeptic and cynic that perfectly offsets Hawke’s more casual, warm, inviting Clay and while it’s clear in the acting work that their characters are struggling in their marriage, scenes between the two have an effortless nature in them in helping to set up the construct of the film before they go off on their own journeys.
The singular best performance in “Leave The World Behind” comes from two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali as G.H., a stranger to the family who claims to be the homeowner of the rental property where they are staying.
While Ali has a natural charm and gravitas that makes him relatively easy to trust and engage with as a character, his quiet presence and demeanor help him shadow behind his eyes that G.H. knows more than he’s probably letting on to other characters, and to himself in a certain extend.
Where Esmail swings for the fences is in his visual iconography, achieved in tandem with director of photography Tod Campbell, taking traditional camera angles and make them slightly askew or completely unnatural in such a way that gives the entire film a pseudo-voyeuristic approach.
Campbell routinely spins the camera from off-kilter angles as the world spirals around the characters and the interesting visual geography of the large house the family rents is definitely maximized by both post-modern production design and the elaborately engaging cinematography.
“Leave The World Behind” is an intensely aggressive film to look at even without sound on and the ways in which Esmail is able to maintain a sense of geographic pace while presenting audiences with something new visually makes the otherwise straightforward tale especially mesmerizing.
Some of the cinematography has a top-down viewpoint that almost feels as if the camera is attached to a satellite orbiting the world of the film which helps accent the existential dread in the latter third of the film as the technological and societal implications of the film unfold.
And combined with a haunting, yet ever present soundtrack from composer Mac Quayle, “Leave The World Behind” is an increasingly strange, cerebral, and chilling examination of the depths of one’s humanity as their morality is put to the test.
For a film with this much star power and swing for the fences filmmaking to go relatively unnoticed in a small theatrical run before debuting this past weekend on Netflix, “Leave The World Behind” is a surprisingly underrated psychological thriller to plop in cinephiles’ laps this holiday season and well worth taking the chance on at home despite how terrifying the film’s broader implications might be.
Leave a Reply