What do you want to be doing when the world ends? Keep your near ones close as civilisation goes out with a bang (or a whimper) or sit in front of your TV set and take comfort in knowing how your favourite series ends, even when you don’t know how you will? Leave The World Behind opts for the latter. But in a year when we have lost one of its most beloved stars, it is telling that the TV show is Friends.
Dropped on Netflix last weekend, Leave The World Behind is the latest addition to the apocalyptic thriller genre. Based on Rumaan Alam’s eponymous novel written in 2020 — a notable time in global history when the pandemic brought us pretty close to doomsday — this is a tense, if not very taut, Armageddon narrative which also throws in commentary on everything from capitalism to consumerism to creepy human behaviour in the face of the unknown, and leaves us with a lingering, uncomfortable truth — that we are really our biggest enemies.
“I f***king hate people,” Amanda Sanford tells her husband Clay one morning as she looks out of the window of their New York apartment. The fact that these words come from ‘America’s Sweetheart’ and Hollywood’s resident sunshine girl Julia Roberts somewhat prepares the ground for what is afoot. Amanda has a plan — she has already packed their bags and before long, the Sanfords pack their two teenagers (Rose and Archie, played by Farrah Mackenzie and Charlie Evans respectively) in a car and head off to an idyllic weekend at a plush home in Long Island. “Leave the world behind” is exactly what’s on their mind.
But that quickly takes a turn. An afternoon in the sun is cut short when an oil tanker uncontrollably sails right up to the beach and almost squashes a few people. What goes out first are phones, TVs, tabs et al — the creature comforts that form a mainstay of our daily lives and whose absence alone can spell doomsday for many of us. A blackout is next, and before long, the Sanfords encounter a father and daughter (George, played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la’s Ruth) at their doorstep. They are seeking to spend the night there, but they are not strangers to the home. In fact, they own it.
At first suspicious of the two, Amanda — who admits that she isn’t pretty likeable, one of the film’s nudges at how disconnected and asocial to the point of being rude almost all of us have become — gradually warms to the two, especially when things quickly start going south. Wild deer show up in the backyard and flamingos land in the pool, the highway to the city is clogged with a pile-up of hundreds of self-driven Teslas (we saw what you did there!), deafening sirens start blaring, aeroplanes fall to the ground, a key player suffers a strange affliction and drones drop pamphlets proclaiming ‘Death to America’.
Director Sam Esmail, taking a few departures from the book but remaining true to its core, builds an unnerving, slow-burn thriller which interrogates implicit (and explicit) racism and taps into the sheer eeriness that stems from fear and uncertainty. A number of terrific set pieces — the film’s characters encounter the impending apocalypse both individually and collectively — prepares the stage for a thought-provoking psychological study on humanity.
That Leave The World Behind is executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama — Esmail has recently revealed how the former US president would pitch in with frequent suggestions on plot and players — gives an added edge, leaving us to ruminate on where we are heading. The film — in which Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali are the pick of the actors, as expected, Ethan Hawke pitches in with a steady act and Kevin Bacon’s cameo is the cherry on the cake — wants audiences to connect the dots between the characters and the episodes, adding morality or questioning authority. It invites viewers to let the experience of impending doom wash over them and just absorb the feel without engaging deeper. That may disappoint many looking for a spelt-out denouement, but in the end, all that we want, the film says, is to be happy. Even as the screen blanks out to I’ll Be There For You. But when the time comes, will we?
Which is your favourite doomsday watch? Tell t2@abp.in
