Leave the World Behind: Film Review
Rumaan Alam‘s novel, Leave the World Behind, really resonated with readers when it came out during the pandemic but I felt let down by the book and again by the movie adaptation.
Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke play Amanda and Clay, a married couple who rent a house on Long Island and take a holiday with their kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). One night, the house’s owner, G.H. (Mahershala Ali), returns home with his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) – there has been a blackout in the city and they need to stay. As unexplainable things start happening, the families have to band together to survive what could be the end of the world.
The adaptation is a more satisfying apocalyptic thriller than the book simply because you need those visuals to really understand the gravity of the situation. Writer/director Sam Esmail added in some big disaster setpieces to make the movie more thrilling and cinematic and a sense of dread, confusion and unease pervades the film thanks to the chilling music and unusual, discombobulating camera movements and angles.
While we have those big sequences, it is still mostly a contained character study. It explores how we would cope if we lost the internet, the TV and all forms of signal and proves that we are useless without them. We don’t know how else to occupy ourselves! They are isolated without any information about what is going on outside so they have to come up with the best course of action. The film is more exciting when they venture outside because the threat is more obvious but the character dynamics within the house are interesting.
This is where the film diverges from the book in a big way. In the novel, G.H. is significantly older than Amanda and Clay, and Ruth is his wife rather than his daughter. Making G.H. a similar age means he doesn’t have that power of seniority over them. Although it changes the dynamics a lot, I liked that Ruth was the daughter instead because she was more outspoken and didn’t care about being polite to the strangers in her home. Naturally, there is no trust between them at the start but they have to put those concerns aside to focus on the potential apocalypse!
People expecting a pacey action-packed thriller might be disappointed. There are a lot of conversations in between the unsettling, unexplainable goings-on so the pace is slow. The ending of the film was marginally more satisfying than the book because of little tweaks but I was still disappointed by where it ends.
The script is well-written, the performances are excellent across the board and the setpieces are very cool but I wanted more to happen.
On Netflix from Friday 8th December