Leave the World Behind was adopted from a book by Rumaan Alam and recently premiered on Netlix.
Ever since I sat down to watch it — because I love Julia Roberts and anything even vaguely apocalyptic — I have not been able to get the film out of my head.
It’s a terrifying and also very modern movie, where the pacing and dialogue aren’t always what you’d expect. By the end, however, I just sat there stunned. Stunned and feeling lucky because I had watched it.
I know I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: the world is always ending. Every death is an end of the world, and also a new beginning. At the same time, there are periods that another great adaptation, The Expanse, describes as throwing people into “the churn.” Times when the established order of things is changing, sometimes dramatically so.
There is a lot of fear, nowadays, that we are in the churn and that it is intensifying. I don’t know if hindsight will prove these fears to be correct, but I do know that safety and comfort are very fragile things. People who are unaware of the fragility inherent in a peaceful day-to-day life are almost lucky, in a way. Ignorance can too be a form of luck.
Leave the World Behind is interesting because it shows us how fragile civilization is without either romanticizing or condemning it — and how fragile, too, are the borders of civilization, where wild animals play and the sea currents roam and anything might happen, anything at all.
I could devote a lot of column space to the social commentary provided by the film, often acerbic but never grating, but I’ll leave that to people who are better equipped than I am.
What I would like to say is that Leave the World Behind is a good reminder that we are defined by the bonds we make — whether those bonds hold, whether they can be forged or re-forged. It’s an artful testament to the fact that human beings are social, and in being social, in seeing one another for what we are, we are more resilient than we realize.
A lot of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives center on the idea that human beings are fucked-up savages who turn on each other the minute the shit hits the fan. There is a lot of truth to this idea.
There is also, however, a competing story, and it’s borne out by history: people know when to band together. People are tougher, more creative, and more interesting than they get credit for. People can find comfort in unexpected places. People have lived and can live through a lot. People shouldn’t hate each other.
I wasn’t expecting to feel this way about a movie in the beginning of which Julia Roberts’ character very convincingly says that she “hates people.” It’s not like her character is being insanely unreasonable. There is quite a bit to hate! Take it from me, a person who’s been caught in a riot, held at gunpoint, punched in the throat, you name it.
But at the same time, I am also an admirer of the delicate threads that bind us to one another, and I think that Leave the World Behind captures them beautifully.
It’s a good movie to watch if you’re convinced that the world is once again deciding to fuck with you. It’s droll, much like fate can be droll, but it also has a deeper current running through it.
We need that current more than ever right now, I am convinced of that. We need each other. We need to remember that, as corny as it sounds, new beginnings can rise out of terrible endings.