What Does the Ending of Netflix's 'Leave the World Behind' Mean?

By Dustin Rowles | Film | December 13, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Film | December 13, 2023 |

Spoilers, but you knew that when you clicked

The Internet seems to be evenly split on the ending to Sam Esmail’s Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind. Half the internet hates it, and the other half thinks, “Eh, it was fine.” I largely fall into the “Eh, it was fine” camp. I thought it was a moody, disturbing, mysterious, and well-acted thriller, and while I wasn’t necessarily expecting Esmail to give the audience a definitive ending that answered all of our lingering questions, I also expected more than a brief exposition dump from the driver’s seat of a car.

Briefly, here’s the plot of Leave the World Behind: Amanda and Clay (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke) take their kids on a weekend getaway outside of the city in an Airbnb. In the middle of their first night there, the homeowner and his daughter, George and Ruth (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold), return because things are getting weird in the city.

Outside of the city, things are also getting weird. A ship is beached; scores of deer surround the area; they lose the Internet and any access to the outside world; a plane drops a lot of flyers with “Death to America” written on them; there are weird, ear-piercing noises; and everyone in the area seems to retreat to their homes. Amanda and Clay’s interactions with George and Ruth are initially awkward and tense, but they get to know each other better over the weekend, and those interactions are less awkward and tense.

However, Amanda and Clay’s son, Archie, gets sick and starts losing his teeth while their daughter, Rosie, disappears. All the daughter wants to do is finally finish watching Friends, but couldn’t do so over the course of the weekend because there is no Internet. In the end, she discovers a shelter built for the end of the world, and it has Friends in its DVD collection, so she gets her happy ending. We are more or less left to presume that the rest of the family, as well as George and Ruth, find her and take up residence in the bomb shelter, where they leave the world behind and ride out the apocalypse.

But why is all this weird stuff happening? As George explains to Clay, he’s aware of a computer program that’s likely behind the unfolding events. The program is designed to isolate everyone by cutting off communications and travel (the roads are clogged because every Tesla has been hacked and instructed to crash into each other, which is maybe the most terrifyingly and hilariously prescient part of the film); and then the program is designed to create a sense of confusion through disinformation (the flyers) and unexpected events (the noises). If a society is already on the brink of dysfunction — as America is — by isolating and confusing the population, society will turn on each other, there will be civil war, and the country will collapse.

But the daughter still gets to finish watching Friends.

Look: I get it! America is already fragile. All it might take is a small nudge for Leave the World Behind to turn into Alex Garland’s Civil War. Sam Esmail’s film provides timely commentary on the state of the world, although I’m not sure how necessary the commentary is. We all know we’re on the brink, and while I appreciate the Hitchockian creepiness of Leave the World Behind and the collapse of society it portends in the near future, the man is speaking to the choir. By “the choir,” I mean: He’s speaking to the world. We know. We don’t need a better understanding of how tenuous things are; we can turn on cable news and find things just as terrifying or more.

I’m not saying that every movie should be an escape from reality instead of a reflection of it, but what I do think is if you’re going to provide social commentary on the state of the world, don’t leave a single character to explain it all away during a three-minute scene about a dangerous computer program, or another scene involving a beloved ’90s sitcom to stress that society — so preoccupied with their screens — has completely checked out of reality. We get it. We suck. But Ross and Rachel really were on a break!