LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke face the apocalypse in a film that flips the disaster movie on its head.
The disaster movie is a tried-and-true cinematic genre, from the sublime (Titanic, Gravity) to the, well, disastrous (Geostorm, Meteor). But what they all have in common is that the cause of the cataclysm is never in doubt – usually it’s in the title. This is definitively not the case in Leave the World Behind, Sam Esmail’s adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 bestseller in which society as we know it crumbles with an unsettling question mark.
‘That fear of the unknown was something that really excited me,’ Esmail (Mr Robot) tells Teasers. ‘In this story, we never tell you, really, what the disaster is. It’s a mystery. It’s ambiguous. It’s something that the characters have to debate over and analyse. Even towards the end, you’re still not quite sure what’s happening.’
There are hints at what’s going on; cyberattacks appear to be a key component. But this uncertainty, Esmail argues, is much truer to the average person’s experience of a crisis – as anyone who spent hours of their lives wiping down shopping during the pandemic could testify – and presented an opportunity to flip the disastermovie format on its head.
‘What was interesting,’ the writerdirector explains, ‘was this idea of taking the tropes of the disaster genre, which usually involves focusing on spectacle, and inverting it by making the characters the priority, and really pushing those disaster elements off into the distance.’
That’s not to say there isn’t spectacle in Leave the World Behind. Oil tankers run aground on busy public beaches, planes fall from the sky, and self-driving Teslas go haywire. But the film is as much chamber piece as disaster movie, with the conflict between a small group of characters from all walks of life, trapped in an isolated location, reflecting where we are as a society in 2023.
‘There was something about the way they clashed with each other in the setting that really resonated with me,’ says Esmail, who quickly moved to adapt Alam’s novel after reading it in 2020. ‘The book zeroed in on the polarisation that does occur during a crisis. It really ends up dividing us, more than uniting us. I wanted to focus in on that.’
Surveyed by Esmail’s agile camera, the bulk of the action takes place in an immaculate Long Island house that Amanda (Julia Roberts), Clay (Ethan Hawke) and their kids (Farrah Mackenzie, Charlie Evans) are renting for the weekend. On the first night, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la) turn up on the doorstep unannounced, dressed to the nines, claiming to be the owners. They’ve returned after a major blackout in the city, something that no one can verify because both the intern
