Synopsis
Leave the World Behind is a powerful 2023 psychological thriller that explores trust, societal breakdown, and the delicate threads holding modern life together. Sam Esmail, known for Mr. Robot, directs and adapts the film from Rumaan Alam’s bestselling 2020 novel. The movie captures our current fears by blending a quiet sense of the end with raw personal conflict.
Amanda and Clay Sandford (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke), a comfortable Brooklyn couple in their forties, rent an isolated, upscale beach house on Long Island for a brief escape. With their teenage kids, Archie and Rose, they arrive hoping to unplug, breathe ocean air, and shake the constant buzz of work emails and social media. The long journey feels like the start of a long, relaxing weekend.
Their getaway is interrupted when, just after midnight, an older Black couple—G.H. Scott, played by Mahershala Ali, and his daughter Ruth, played by Myha’la Herrold—knock on the door and say they own the house. G.H. says a huge blackout has hit the city and they drove up here for safety. Amanda stiffens with suspicion, while Clay, wanting to be polite, can’t shake off the chill Amanda feels. The story’s core question hangs in the air: Should they believe these strangers? Are they telling the truth?
Everyone is forced to share the small space and the growing fear as odd, frightening things keep happening. The internet dies and cell phones stop working. The TV and radio stay silent. Low, weird booms shake the walls. Deer suddenly stop grazing and stare. A few small planes fall over the trees. The signs add up to a disaster, but what the disaster is nobody can say.
While the outside world fractures, the people inside keep splitting. The film lets the breakdown of city life shadow everything as it digs into race, money, and the fear of the end. Amanda’s hidden biases spill out. Clay’s bookish calm can’t fix anything. The kids watch, caught in a nightmare that both feels unreal and declares that something has gone very, very wrong.
What makes Leave the World Behind so chilling is how it keeps every moment in a fog of uncertainty. Is the danger a bomb? A cyberattack? An invasion? Something inside us? Is this the first wave of collapse, or just a teaser for worse? The story never settles on one answer, and that’s the whole point. Sam Esmail shapes the plot to mirror the dizzying helplessness we feel whenever real crises hit the news.
The film’s peak doesn’t hand us a neat finish. Instead, it forces us to face a quiet dread: in a world where we’re always wired, losing the signal feels scarier than any blast or beast. In the last minutes, the people are scattered—alone, piecing together what’s left of safety and of themselves. There’s a quiet gut-punch when Rose, the daughter, can’t stop replaying Friends on DVD, clutching it like a lucky charm, only to find the show’s curtain call tucked in a cold, dark bunker. That tiny moment still echoes, a ghost whisper of the comforts we clutch when everything else goes dark.
Cast & Crew
Julia Roberts as Amanda Sandford
Roberts plays Amanda, a mother whose love is clouded by hidden anxieties and old biases. At first, she seems nurturing, but as the story unfolds, her guarded judgment and fears come to light. Roberts gives a performance that balances tenderness and a guarded edge, leaving viewers to question what she will do in the moment of crisis.
Ethan Hawke as Clay Sandford
Clay, portrayed by Hawke, is the academic husband who thinks deeply but struggles to act. Rather than the stoic protector, he is quietly frustrated and emotionally reserved, showing how the ideals of masculinity crumble when the situation demands a different kind of strength. Hawke’s performance captures the tension of a man who is smart enough to predict danger but not sure how to confront it.
Mahershala Ali as G.H. Scott
Ali’s G.H. Scott is a wealthy Black man whose calm reason and underlying mystery shake Amanda’s rigid worldview about race and privilege. Ali commands attention with a stillness that fills the room, and his ability to listen is as powerful as any line of dialogue.
Myha’la Herrold as Ruth Scott
Ruth, played by Herrold, is brazen and unsparing, cutting through Amanda and Clay’s polite fictions with a single question. Her impatience speaks to a younger generation that has already rehearsed disaster. Herrold’s performance is fierce, layering skepticism with a quiet hunger for candor.
Farrah Mackenzie as Rose Sandford
Rose, the youngest Sandford, is mostly preoccupied with bingeing the final season of her favorite show. Her fixation on a world of scripted endings is a gentle counterpoint to the real-life unraveling around her. Mackenzie plays her with a quiet innocence that makes the family’s cracks feel deeper, as Rose’s desire for a tidy ending becomes painfully relatable.
Charlie Evans as Archie Sandford
Portraying the protective older brother, Archie Sandford, Charlie Evans navigates the emotional push-and-pull of impending disaster. Archie absorbs the fallout of the crisis in his body and mind, culminating in a sudden, alarming health episode that magnifies every fear the family harbors.
Directed and Written by Sam Esmail
Sam Esmail’s signature visual language saturates the film: wide-angle lenses, deliberate pans, and a weighty quiet that feels almost claustrophobic. Tension arrives not through gunfire or explosions, but through a hollowed-out silence that stretches the frame until it feels ready to snap.
Based on the Novel by Rumaan Alam
Though the film diverges in plot from Alam’s novel, the emotional core endures. Esmail deepens the thread of failing technology—phones that won’t connect, screens that darken—while wrapping the story in a pervasively visual dread that lingers even as daylight breaks.
Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions
When Higher Ground Productions puts a stamp on a project, it signals intent: entertain, yes, but also interrogate what the present and future owe each other. This film wears that intention front and center.
IMDb Ratings & Reception
With a 6.6/10 on IMDb, the film generates divided but engaged conversation. Critics laud the immersive atmosphere and layered acting, yet some viewers push back against its open-ended story and the deliberate pace that leaves more unsaid than spoken.
Critics have mostly cheered Sam Esmail’s direction for how it creates a sense of nameless dread and tightens suspense without any jump scares or bloodshed. The camera work and the haunting score both earned praise for pulling the audience deeper into the film’s unsettling world.
At the same time, some audience members wished for clearer answers or a more resolved ending. Esmail chose to focus on the characters’ inner lives instead of tying every plot thread together, and that choice divided opinions. Still, many viewers valued the film’s insistence on showing race, class, and global anxiety as messy and unfinished, rather than wrapping them in tidy explanations.
Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali received particular praise for performances that many called the film’s greatest strength, turning the story into a character study rather than a spectacle. Ethan Hawke and Myha’la Herrold also impressed, providing a steady emotional core that kept the tension alive.
The closing sequence, where Rose finds the hidden bunker and obsessively tries to finish a sitcom while the world collapses, led to sharp discussion. Some saw it as a warped kind of black humor and a sad kind of hope; others felt it weakened the emotional ride. That clash, however, seems intentional—it reflects how people still reach for familiar routines and old jokes when everything else feels out of control.
Conclusion
Leave the World Behind is a chilling reflection on what unravels when the underpinnings of everyday life fray without a sound. The story avoids giant explosions, outer-space visitors, or any obvious disaster. Instead, it zeros in on the slow, almost invisible erosion of safety and faith in one another. The effect is strongest in the voids of conversation, the paused breaths, and the lurking menace that refuses to reveal itself.
The movie does not hand you solutions. Instead, it hands you open-ended worries: How do we interact with strangers we decide we need? What of the beliefs we never questioned? And how ready are we when the unimaginable arrives? With remarkable acting, unsettling images, and a bare-bones approach to plot, Leave the World Behind quietly earns its place as one of the most unnerving films of the past few years.
It is a reflection of our present anxiety. What follows when the Wi-Fi signal drops for good? When our screens go mute and the world outside remains a mystery? When the people next door become our only chance for explanation, yet we hesitate to trust? The questions linger long after the credits roll.
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