Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail Get Too Close to Global Chaos in Leave the World Behind

If you're looking for something to stream that will leave you paranoid about the state of the world, Leave the World Behind proves no two creatives are dramatizing global military-industrial-technological threats, the kind you won't even be aware of until it's Too Late, better than Sam Esmail and Julia Roberts.

Esmail, the writer, director, and producer of shows like Mr. Robot, and Roberts, the Oscar-winning actress and global mega-star, first teamed up on the 2018 Amazon series Homecoming, before reuniting for Starz's Gaslit last year. Now, they're back together as director and star (as well as co-producers) of Leave the World Behind, the Netflix feature film based on Rumaan Alam's novel that could not be a better fit for the pair. He has a knack for technological paranoia filmed with a Hitchcockian flair, like M. Night Shyamalan with a smidge more respect for the laws of nature. She's mastered the art of playing relatable women while still being an otherworldly screen beauty. Her signature performances in films like Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, and Erin Brockovich highlight her talent for playing grounded and unattainable at the same time.

Esmail directed every episode of the first season of Homecoming, which starred Roberts (in her first TV role as anything but a guest star) as a caseworker on a top-secret government project that turned out to be attempting to create supersoldiers for crypto-military use. Esmail pulled out all sorts of ostentatious filmmaking techniques — overhead shots, upside-down camera, push-ins — in order to emphasize the surreality of the Homecoming experiments. It was set in the real world, yes, but there was something more happening that leaves the viewer — and many of the show's characters — unsure of the ground beneath them. Roberts was so compelling as she played that unsteadiness, bringing to mind the paranoid thrillers starring A-listers like Robert Redford and Tom Cruise.

Five years later, they're back with Leave the World Behind, a paranoid thriller about what seems to be a global technological meltdown. Roberts plays Amanda, a Type-A client services director at an ad agency who plans a weekend and an idyllic Long Island vacation home for her family: husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) and teen kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). Things start falling apart in small ways. The Wi-Fi goes down, preventing Rose from watching Friends on her tablet. The TV signal is down too. Then, on the beach, a massive oil tanker runs aground — it's one of several to experience navigation issues that day.

That night, two people appear at the house, George (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la Herrold). George claims to be the owner of the house; Amanda is skeptical of him in a way that toes the line between her previously stated distrust and hatred of all people and plain old racism. George and Ruth say there's been a blackout in Manhattan, and they want to take refuge in their home. An uneasy co-habitation begins as unsettling omens give way to terrifying sounds all around them that the world may be collapsing from some kind of cyber attack.

This is all right up Sam Esmail's alley. Mr. Robot played around with the very thin line that separates normal society from abject chaos, and the role that a technology that is advancing by leaps and bounds plays in further reducing that line. What happens when the Wi-Fi goes out, the GPS stops working, and the airplanes can no longer fly? There's a survivalist POV (represented here by a character played by Kevin Bacon) that's concerned with how people can equip themselves for the collapse. But Esmail seems much more concerned with how people are able to handle this kind of rapid societal breakdown on a psychological level.

Esmail's still eager to use incredibly showy filmmaking tricks to throw the audience off its bearings. His camera is an omniscient observer with a mind of its own. He's fond of nature as a harbinger. In Homecoming, a wayward pelican wandering a deserted lobby was assumed to be a clue to a season-long mystery, but sometimes it's just a marker to note that things have really gone wrong. There's a moment with a flock of (unfortunately chintzy-looking) CGI flamingos that serves the same purpose.

The technological apocalypse offers plenty of ideas to ruminate on, from how much power we've ceded to techno-despots like Elon Musk to what actually should scare us the most in the event of a collapse such as this. As George says to Amanda, the terrifying thing isn't the idea that some shadowy cabal of evildoers is behind an attack this big; it's the idea that no one is actually in control at all.

Amid all this, Esmail and Roberts understand that despite the real-world implications, a good sci-fi thriller like this needs to be able to let loose every now and then. It's one of the best qualities of Esmail's work, a sense of fun amid the dread. Leave the World Behind's most memorable moment — the one that transcends any one mere film and will live on in perpetuity, so long as there is electricity enough to broadcast it — is the scene in which George and Amanda put on some music and start dancing, a moment of respite from the paranoia and fear. Anyone in the elder millennial age bracket is going to recognize the strains of Next's "Too Close," which as needle drops go is flat-out incredible. And that's before Roberts and Ali start dancing. Full-on, hands-in-the-air, dance-like-no-one's-watching boogieing. It belongs on any list of the scenes of the year. All it took was a couple drinks, the threat of imminent global collapse, and the physical comedy of Julia Roberts shaking it like a Polaroid picture as an uptight white-collar advertising executive.

The scene doesn't last long, and within moments, the tense reality of the situation descends once again. But it's a reminder that a Sam Esmail/Julia Roberts joint is always going to keep you guessing. Leave the World Behind thrives on that kind of uncertainty.

Leave the World Behind is streaming on Netflix. 

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.