Leave the World Behind review: Julia Roberts stars in a ‘timely’ and ‘chilling’ thriller
NetflixJulia Roberts and Ethan Hawke are convincing in the suspenseful, entertaining Netflix film, Leave the World Behind, an adaptation of Rumaan Alam's apocalyptic novel, writes Caryn James.
How will the world end? Back in 1920 the poet Robert Frost suggested fire or ice. How quaint. The possibilities hovering over Sam Esmail's suspenseful, apocalyptic Leave the World Behind are cyberattacks, rogue AI, nuclear annihilation and climate change, but also plain old-fashioned human evil. The options sound grim, yet this suspenseful drama makes them entertaining. Esmail's adaptation of Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel adds a playful Hitchcockian spin and the starry cast of Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali to create a psychological thriller about family, technology and life in the 21st Century.
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Roberts and Hawke are Amanda and Clay Sandford, a middle-class couple living in a Brooklyn apartment with their 16-year-old son, 13-year-old daughter, and a big crack on their bedroom wall. In Roberts's wry delivery, Amanda announces that she hates people in general, and that she has rented a luxurious house surrounded by woods on Long Island for a weekend family escape. The trees there are such bright green that the film has a slightly hyperreal aura from the start.
Deep into their first night away, there is an ominous knock on the door. GH (Ali) arrives with his daughter, Ruth (Myha'la Herrold, who played Harper in Industry), explains that he owns the house, that New York City is experiencing a major power outage, and that they would like to stay the night.
Although Roberts is saddled with too many clunky lines about the bleakness of human nature, she makes them work and is strongly convincing as the cynical, distrustful member of the family. She subtly adds a layer of unconscious racial bias when she says to GH "This is your house">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });