Imagine if Alfred Hitchcock came back to life, took a bunch of meth, and then tried to make a Stephen King movie in the style of M. Knight Shyamalan. That’s what you’ve got in the “dystopian thriller” (two words that should not be used together ever) Leave the World Behind. Based on a book by Rumann Alam (a gay man whose parents emigrated from Pakistan in the 1970s), the film was produced by Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama to make movies for Netflix. After all, filmmaking is a subject the pair know nothing about but for which Netflix was prepared to more than overpay them (did I mention Susan Rice is on the board at Netflix?)
The story is paced like a roller coaster ride but one that occasionally submerges you in water or throws you out of the car onto a cactus. The story moves wildly up and down, back and forth, often with unexpected plot twists broken up by breathers in-between. You literally do not know what is going to happen next. Unfortunately, you don’t know what happened when the movie is over, either.
The plot points are wild (spoiler alert): animals behave in menacing and unexpected ways, a tanker ship runs aground onto a beach, electric cars start to self-drive themselves, bombs go off, the internet goes down, there is some kind of sound device that goes off, new diseases spread, oh, and at one point for no apparent reason a bunch of flamingos descend onto the swimming pool. While loading up this film with quirky plot devices and eerie shtick from other filmmakers, they left out the plot. There is no plot, but in it s place, you get an extra dollop of creep. You can see how creepy the film is by looking at this shot of the youngest kids caught in one of their more “normal” moments.
The film opens when Amanda (played by a cranky Julia Roberts) wakes up one morning in her New York home, announces she hates people, and then tells her husband and two kids they are going on vacation. Apparently, that’s how people in New York go on vacation—the mom just wakes up and whisks everyone off 10 minutes after she arises. They leave almost instantly. Dad doesn’t have to go to work that day—he doesn’t even have to call in or make arrangements. The kids don’t have to go to school, and Amanda manages to find a vacation rental that’s available that same day. They apparently are speed-packers.
Of course, I’m being too picky here. However, I subscribe to the Mr. Ed theory of visual arts. I learned as a kid from Mr. Ed that people willingly accept one outlandish premise for the sake of entertainment but they will revolt against two or more outlandish premises. Case in point: Mr. Ed is a talking horse. People who watch and enjoy the show accept that. But in some shows, Mr. Ed was shown talking on a telephone. That became a deal-breaker for many avid fans, because how on earth could a horse dial a phone? Horses have hooves. They can’t dial an old-school rotary phone. People were upset. Horses can talk, that’s fine, but don’t tell me horses can dial phones! You can have one outlandish premise here (a bunch of random apocalyptic events with no point or explanation) but not two (a mom who decides to take a multiday vacation and a family of four who just obey her and leave for vacation right away upon her order). One or the other. Not both.
Lots more of these Mr. Ed dilemmas occur. In another scene, Amanda is with her husband Clay (played by Ethan Hawke) driving on an expressway thinking they can outdrive the crazy events that occur on their vacation. Clay, by the way, is the epitome of how liberals view white men: rich, hapless, submissive to wives and circumstances, and ultimately irrelevant to the story. Clay and Amanda drive quite a while, when suddenly (everything in this film happens suddenly) hundreds of identical white electric vehicles (EVs) are piled up ahead of them. Then suddenly more white EVs careen down the expressway behind them, so they have to play bumper cars. Hundreds of cars, crashing into each other. The weird thing is—how did they ride down the expressway for miles and not see one EV and then come upon a massive hundred-plus-car pile-up? And why were EVs barreling down on them at one moment, but they didn’t see any before?
Lots more of Mr. Ed moments. Their son, Archie, is bitten by a tick who has some new kind of disease which managed to both incubate in the bug and jump the species barrier to infect humans (a rarity) in about a day and a half. Sorry, I can believe random strange end-of-the-world events or a radical new disease that jumps the species barriers in 36 hours, but not both.
Amanda’s family goes off to their vacation rental—which they describe as a sort of ordinary house but is more like a mansion—and that evening, the owners come knocking at the door. The owners in this case are a Black man and his teenage daughter. They tell Amanda’s family that there is a major power outage in New York and they didn’t know what to do, so they wanted to come back to their home. Amanda sees no evidence of a blackout and refuses to let them in, announcing she paid for the rental. Remember, practically the first line of this film was that Amanda hates all other people. The homeowner agrees to a refund, she is still obstinate and wants to see some ID to prove this man is the rightful owner of the house. This is perhaps the funniest moment in the whole film for me. The Black man checks his pockets and realizes he left his wallet in his overcoat which he left in a check room at some posh event in New York. He has no ID on him.
(The Mr. Ed moment here is that the man had over a thousand dollars—in cash—to refund the house rental money on his person, but he couldn’t produce an ID card.)
I find that funny because the Obamas are big advocates that voter ID is racist because Black people can’t manage to have ID cards. I guess this is proof that Black people can’t be expected to keep track of an ID card.
The homeowner in this film is gentle, patient, and dignified; they originally wanted Denzel Washington for the role. The character’s name is G.H. Scott, which is the most dignified name in the whole film, perhaps in the whole world. G.H. Scott is played by Mahershala Ali. Mrs. Scott is not with him; she was traveling at the time and likely in a plane when the blackout and ensuing events happened. G.H. Scott worries—but not too visibly—that she may have been killed in these strange events. The daughter, named Ruth (played by Myha’la) seems oblivious to the fact that her mom may have perished in these strange events; she is more interested in strutting around in a bikini. In terms of hating humanity, Ruth could give Amanda a run for her money.
The internet goes dark, satellite phones do not work, the electricity shuts off. The two families share the house and try to figure out what is going on but any time they even think about anything, something new and even stranger happens.
In a pause between disasters, G.H. Scott and Amanda sit down to have a talk and start to like each other a bit. Of course, they’re drunk and getting drunker at the time, but Amanda for a moment stops snarling at G.H. Scott. G.H. Scott is a relentlessly charming man and when Amanda puts down her fists, they actually enjoy each other a bit. This leads to an embrace and a potential sexual encounter that they both reject. Both of them are married and Amanda’s husband, Clay, is probably in the next room. But the surprising part was that the honorable G.H. Scott is hitting on a married woman at the same moment he’s also pondering if his wife might have died in a plane crash. Another Mr. Ed moment. I can believe Scott’s wife might be dead in an unexplainable plane crash, but I cannot accept that at that moment, the honorable Mr. Scott would want to romance a mean-spirited drunken white woman.
At one point, hundreds of deer converge on the house. They look more like taxidermy than genuine deer, but they’re clearly not friendly. That’s kind of how the scenes in the movie are juxtaposed.
Long story short, the families form a reluctant unspoken agreement to share the home and unify. More eerie stuff happens, and nothing is explained. It’s not even that satisfying type of ambiguity you get with The Birds where you wonder if such avian attacks could happen again… you just aren’t told why all this incredibly weird stuff happens, what it might mean, and if it could happen again.
Literally, if an Acme anvil dropped out of the sky without warning and landed on one of these characters, it would have fit right into the plot.
To make matters even more unbearable or perhaps to give you a true dystopian vibe, the film’s sound track is horrible. Here is Amanda listening to it.
There are inklings of what might be causing the film’s cascade of disasters: one of the characters finds a flyer with some Arabic writing on it. The town’s prepper insists the Koreans or the Chinese are behind the attack. G.H. Scott, the Black man who does not have ID, postulates that maybe nobody is in charge and these things are just randomly occurring. Nobody mentions AI, but that is obliquely suggested.
The foundation of the film is that we don’t know what is happening or why it is happening and we have no control. I guess that’s the dystopian part. And we can either be genteel and dignified like G.H. Scott, angry and snotty like Amada, weak and feckless like Clay, or we can strut around in a bikini and show off our tattoos like Ruth. Clay and Amanda’s son, Archie, only wants to watch Ruth (he shoots video of her). The daughter, Rose, only wants to watch Friends. I guess each of us will respond to the end of days in our own personal way. But no one responded in a spiritual way. No one reached out in prayer or love. No one questioned God or even spoke to Him. That seemed far-fetched. Six people worried that they would not live to see tomorrow and not a prayer among them.
Oh, is that an atomic bomb?
The “owner” of the film is Rose, the daughter of Amanda and Clay. Rose is hooked on Friends. Her world is upended when internet and even power go down but, if she can’t manage to tune in to the show, she likes to talk about Friends. It gives her comfort. The film kind of wraps around Rose—she wants to watch Friends more than go on vacation, then she can’t watch Friends because of that pesky apocalypse, then she is able to watch Friends again at the end when the family settles into a bunker (which they just suddenly find) that miraculously has a DVD player, batteries, and an old Friends DVD.
That’s a Mr. Ed moment. Nothing in the film makes sense, but Rose miraculously finds a Friends DVD and batteries when she goes exploring. Miracles do happen in Leave the World Behind, they’re just stupid pointless miracles.
Whatever meaning this film has—meager as it is—can be expressed in the theme song to a sitcom. The theme song to Friends plays at the end and the lyrics are about the most sensible thing you’ll find in the whole film. It is ironic that an Obama-produced film with sympathetic Black characters (and annoying white characters) would use Friends as the core message of its film—that show is regularly castigated in our woke era as being too pale. Maybe the next dystopian thriller can use the theme song from Cheers for its meaning. Life is getting pretty superficial when the words to the Friends song become poetic by contrast to the banality of the movie dialog. But it’s the closest thing to profundity in the whole movie.
Now assuming that Barack and Michelle Obama are sinister characters and Hollywood likes to preprogram the masses for what the evil cabal has in store for us—what does this film even mean? It’s not entertaining except in the way a little kid jumping out of the closet shouting “boo” is entertaining. When the characters talk, it becomes a message film with a preachy mind-control vibe.
At the highest level, this movie suggests that people are going to have to come together to survive when the overlords try to destroy us—but it won’t help. Lofty idea, no real benefit.
Or maybe it means that when Armageddon finally does occur, we are not going to have a clear idea what is going on. I have often thought that. So we are just stooges in somebody else’s movie.
It could also mean events are random and there is no point in trying to figure out what’s next, because we have no control anyway. It’s like a tornado—they just suddenly happen. Except the difference is we know what tornadoes are. No one has ever heard of a thousand deer on Long Island giving people the stink eye. (And here’s a Mr. Ed question—how did all of those deer get on Long Island? Long Island is an island. Did the deer swim there? And why? Why are they mad?)
Maybe it’s to warn us: cyber attacks are coming. Runaway airplanes, self-crashing cars, and out-of-control tanker ships are possible. Blackouts will happen. Bombs will drop and we won’t know where or why. And this film is just to help normalize it for us so we won’t freak out when globalists destroy the earth so they can rule over the ashes.
Nothing is explained, but every now and then you get the idea that G.H. Scott knows something, but, of course, he doesn’t actually know anything of relevance. He can’t even find his ID, remember?
The most perplexing thing to me is how the book on which the film was based was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. I would rate this film a “must miss” unless you are interested in its political preprogramming value or just to see what the Obamas are doing to earn their mega-millions for Netflix. I watched it because a cargo ship crashed into the Key Bridge in Baltimore the other day, and this film by the Obamas opens with a cargo ship so out of control it grounds itself on a tourist beach. That opening scene seemed bizarre until you saw the next scene and 20 minutes into the movie, you’ve forgotten the cargo ship completely, that’s how rapidly oddities blurred together.
My favorite character in the film was the prepper Danny, played by Kevin Bacon. Danny is a suspicious and inhospitable man, which describes half the population of New York. Unlike most preppers, Danny lives a tony Long Island hamlet. I can tell you for a fact, most preppers do not live in the wealthy suburbs of Long Island, and they don’t go to suburban shopping centers for their supplies. I do not think the film’s producers really understand prepping. However, Danny exemplifies a common discussion point in the many and growing circles of people who are battening down the hatches for the coming apocalypse. You can prep all you want, but in the end, you have to decide … when disaster does strike, are you willing to shoot the others who need your supplies or are you going to share and let those wastrels deplete the inventory you so carefully set aside for yourself and your family? That little drama plays out.
And the film also illustrates the Good Samaritan parable (as the Bad Levite) when Clay is driving alone in the car and refuses to help a woman caught all by herself in a disaster. She bangs on his window, cries and screams, even chases the car as he speeds off into the distance. Clay could have helped her, he just did not want to be bothered. She spoke Spanish and he could not understand her, but he understood enough to know she was desperately begging him for help. He pretended the language barrier was the impediment between them. The impediment between them was that he didn’t know what to do and did not want to admit it. He just turned his back on her, because he didn’t know what to do. (By the way, this little story of Clay not helping the Spanish-speaking lady has no anchor in the plot. We never know who she was, what was going on, why she needed help. It was just another random event. Maybe she was trying to say in Spanish the flamingoes had gotten loose.)
Almost 42 million people have seen this film. Don’t be one of them.
I hesitated clicking the heart because I felt I was "liking" the film. But, your movie review was so interesting and also brought chuckles (between my "Whaaaats?") Definitely on my don't-even-think-about-watching list.