By Robert Scucci
| Published
Navigating the early stages of a potentially world-ending event is no easy feat, especially if you’re the characters living within the fiction that Leave the World Behind establishes. After all, when airplanes start falling from the sky and self-driving cars start piling up on the interstate, you may find yourself wondering how you’re going to be able to watch the series finale of Friends on streaming while society crumbles around you, which is something that needs to be addressed immediately. Taking a local approach instead of a global one, Leave the World Behind offers a startling glimpse of how a family vacationing in a remote area copes with getting suddenly cut off from the rest of the outside world as they scramble to find resources to make sure they can survive whatever faceless horrors are coming their way.
We’ve Become Too Reliant On Technology
Leave the World Behind wastes no time establishing how critical technology is to the Sanford family’s sense of wellbeing, as Amanda (Julia Roberts) decides to go on a spontaneous weekend getaway with her husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two children, Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans). On the ride from New York City to the vacation rental, everybody is distracted and disconnected from each other because the only connections they care about are the ones accessed through the devices in their hands.
Settling in for the weekend, Amanda shows just how unlikeable she is when the owner of the house G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la), show up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, claiming that they’re seeking shelter due to a blackout. Though G.H. seems to have some inside knowledge about what’s happening back in the city, he doesn’t reveal any more information than he has to, so as not to cause any unnecessary panic.
Instead of trusting G.H. and Ruth and letting them be comfortable in their own home (something that Ruth makes clear several times), Amanda lets them stay the night after conversing with Clay, but only if they stay in the basement in-law apartment and leave after everybody gets a good night’s sleep.
Waking up the next day, Amanda sees a number of emergency alerts on her cell phone, but they quickly vanish before she can show anybody else.
A Vacation Gone Wrong
Having reason to believe that some kind of global catastrophe is about to occur in Leave the World Behind, both families begin to panic, as they have no way of communicating without their cell phones. Clay sets out to see if he can find any locals who have more information than he does, while G.H. reveals to Amanda that the United States may very well be the victims of a massive cyber attack of unknown origin. Archie, your typical apathetic teenager, feels indifferent about the whole thing, while Rose takes note of the surrounding wildlife acting in increasingly strange ways – like a whole bunch of deer surrounding the vacation home that disappear as quickly as they make their presence known to her.
However, Rose’s primary concern is streaming Friends because she’s working through the series for the first time (poor girl) and it provides a great amount of comfort to her as the family dynamic begins to break down.
Preppers Be Preppin’
Thankfully, Amanda recalls encountering a doomsday prepper named Danny (Kevin Bacon) stocking up on supplies when she went into town for groceries, resulting in Clay and G.H. seeking him out for answers. With no access to radio, internet, or television, there’s no way for anybody to know how far-reaching the problems they’re facing are in Leave the World Behind, which demonstrates just how hopeless human beings are without being constantly dialed into their devices.
Stuck in the middle of nowhere, both families in Leave the World Behind have to use what limited resources they have to find answers, all while emergency sirens blare in the distance, which can only be heard when the entire sky isn’t shrieking at an unthinkable frequency that may be the result of the alleged cyber attack that they’re in no way prepared for.
Streaming Leave The World Behind On Netflix
While you may think that Leave the World Behind suffers from not showing how the rest of the world is coping with the blackouts, it’s quite effective in generating suspense because there’s no strength in numbers at the vacation house, and the entire situation could quickly devolve into an “every man for himself” scenario at the drop of a hat. Not fully understanding just how deep the alleged cyber attack goes, there’s no reasonable way for anybody to know how to find safety, or if everything will blow over and return back to normal.
However, Leave the World Behind gets in its own way on more than one occasion by trying to create conflict that doesn’t necessarily need to be there to move the story along. From the weird, semi-romantic encounters that Amanda has with G.H. when they bond over their distrust of humanity to Clay’s disproportionate amount of hopefulness and strange conversations with Ruth while they’re sitting poolside hitting a vape pen, this movie felt bloated in a way that makes me wish a 90-minute cut existed instead of the 140-minute version we get on Netflix.
At the very least, Leave the World Behind is a solid watch on Netflix because it shows just how hopeless most of us would be if we couldn’t simply log onto social media to see what’s going on. Proving just how quickly the world can become such an incredibly small place if the technology we rely on for our day-to-day interactions disappears overnight, this film will most certainly make you consider hoarding water bottles and canned goods for your survival, and DVDs for your bunker so you don’t lose your mind while you wait for everything to blow over.
