Review: Julia Roberts Wants To 'Leave The World Behind' With Mixed Results

By Jason Adams | Film | December 12, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | December 12, 2023 |

Year-end trend alert! It turns out that knocking was the underrated horror trend of 2023. And it makes sense, one supposes, that the things on our doorsteps would be the things haunting us in the wake of pandemic lockdowns. The year began with Dave Bautista knocking on Jonathan Groff’s door (minds out of the gutter) in M. Night Shyamalan apocalyptic thriller Knock at the Cabin. Then, a couple of months later, the Deadites themselves left the woods and turned door-to-door salesmen (of eternal damnation!) inside the cursed apartment building where Evil Dead Rise took place. For our fall, Mike Flanagan tackled the goth princeling of knockers, rap rap rapping up a raven-ous hit for Netflix with his Edgar Allen Poe spin The Fall of the House of Usher.

And now, here at year’s end, it’s no less than the eternal movie star Julia Roberts’ turn to peephole the apocalypse in Leave the World Behind, Netflix’s occasionally unnerving adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s hit 2020 book from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail.

Playing Amanda, a well-to-do West Village woman who on a whim Vrbos an ultra-fancy house in a leafy Long Island hamlet and drags her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) and their two teenagers Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) off for the weekend, the family’s barely gotten themselves situated when a mid-night knock interrupts their pastoral reveries. On the other side of the door stands a tall handsome man in a tuxedo (Mahershala Ali) and a much younger woman, similarly expensively dressed (Myha’la)—he introduces himself as G.H. and says the woman is his daughter Ruth, and that this house is their house. That Amanda rented it from him over the telephone.

His story (should any of us choose to believe it) is that there was a blackout in the city, and it was easier for him and his daughter to drive out to this property than it was to deal with the developing chaos in Manhattan. But Amanda is immediately off-the-deep-end suspicious, and it’s clear to the rest of us that everybody involved with the making of Leave the World Behind saw those viral videos of the Central Park dog-walking Karen who called the police on the birding black man—it is all very that. Clay tries to play the mediator while G.H. exercises impressive restraint, especially once he realizes he’s left his identification back in the city—let’s all run circles to assuage the nervous white lady!

To the film (and Roberts’) benefit, none of this is (excuse the pun) white-washed—Amanda, who’s already proudly announced earlier in the film that she fucking hates people and that’s why they’re on this mini-vacation in the first place, is not (in that lackluster parlance) a “likeable” character. In the pantheon of Julia roles this is far closer to Closer than it is to everybody’s favorite smiling street-walker Viv in Pretty Woman. But then it’s the knot of tension that’s seized ahold of our former America’s Sweetheart and her not-great emotional being that becomes the through-line of Esmail’s film—Leave the World Behind is very much about us, about now, and about the awful people that we’ve all become here in our constantly terrorized state of being.

Amanda was already on edge, as the things building up to that knock on the door were going a little sideways—the wifi and their cell phones were going in and out and then, in a rather alarming fashion, Speed 2: Cruise Control was reenacted for them as they relaxed on the local beach. (Hey remember when Julia Roberts and Jason Patric were a thing? Or no, you’re not 90 like me?) Anyway this little rented-home-away-from-home invasion just seems like a signal to her that the bad vibes are following them around, confirming her gut-sick feeling. But lady doesn’t know the half of it.

From there Esmail & Co. ratchet up the tension proficiently as Leave the World Behind leaves the family-drama behind and becomes something much grander in scope—as he proved on Mr. Robot he’s got an ace eye for bizarre imagery and that shit rains down in spades here. Sudden hordes of deer poking their snouts out of the woods will seem familiar to anyone who’s ever been to Long Island, but their unbroken gaze from black eyes hums like a static on the film’s periphery. And a trip to the store becomes a horrifying odyssey for Ethan Hawke that recalls both North By Northwest and War of the Worlds simultaneously.

Needless to say this becomes a movie where people who don’t trust each other are forced to share the same space and to see what comes of that—will they crumble or will they find common ground? And will any of that matter when certain third parties become involved and people’s teeth start falling out?

In the end I’m not sure that Leave the World Behind ultimately has a whole lot to add to that conversation—perhaps it does in how of this precise technologically-driven divisive moment it feels. But beyond some harrowing episodes that pile up (love the Tesla gag) I never had the sense that the movie stood decisively upon its own two legs. That it’s not an amalgam of references being repackaged right in front of our eyes. Admittedly sometimes movies like that end up being the best time-capsules—all of our current anxieties and fixations crammed under one roof. But right here and right now I can’t say with much emphasis that you definitively need to heed this one’s knock. Like most shuffled-off-to-streaming titles there’s a good chance this becomes just another, “Hey remember that?” where we shrug in return, kinda mixing it up with Bird Box in our heads in six months.