Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B
Special Effects: C+

This is the new power of Netflix, apparently: Leave the World Behind debuts on Netflix December 8, and that very day I get texts from two different friends: Have you watched Leave the World Behind Yet? and I’m watching the movie Leave the World Behind on Netflix have you seen it?

This movie wasn’t even on my radar. It might have been, had there been a wide release in theaters—instead, yet again, it merely got a limited theatrical release on November 22, something that completely passed me by. I look up what’s playing at my local theaters on a nearly daily basis, but that does not include the traditionally last-run theater The Crest up in Shoreline, which is 11 miles away from me—without a car, that might as well be Mars, especially with three separate multiplexes and three first-run, single-screen theaters within three miles of me. I couldn’t even tell you if this movie did indeed play at The Crest, or anywhere locally, at all.

It’s not even clear whether my friends realized the film had just been released on the very day they were watching it, given the question from both of them as to whether I had watched it yet. I had gone to an actual theater to watch a different movie, give me a chance, sheesh! I looked up the synopsis, though, found it compelling, and I suppose I should admit I was also swayed to a degree by its star power: Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as Amanda and Clay, parents of teenagers who make a sudden decision to rent a house outside the city for a quick, relaxing, “barely off-season” getaway. Then there are Mahershala Ali, as well as Industry’s Myha'la, as G.H. and his grown daughter Ruth, who show up at the house after a blackout occurs, claiming to be the owners of the house and asking for assistance.

I put the movie on, was a bit surprised by the runtime—138 minutes—and, I must confess, there was something about the camera work, as we were introduced to this family of four (Charlie Evans playing horny 16-year-old Archie and Farrah Mackenzie playing inquisitive, Friends-obsessed, 13-year-old Rose). I found myself thinking: This feels like a TV movie. I wonder how differently it might have played in a movie theater.

The plot unfolds very much like a mystery-thriller, and we don’t get anywhere close to concrete information as to what’s behind the blackout until the very end of the film, a kind of quasi-reveal that I only found moderately satisfying. Leave the World Behind is a film that Has Something To Say, and some of the time it’s compelling, but very little of the time is it particularly profound.

What slowly becomes clear as that there is some kind of national cyber attack occurring. G.H. is the only one who seems to know anything, but because he only suspects more than the others know, for a very long time he’s very hesitant to share, which in turn makes him suspicious. Julia Roberts plays Amanda very knowingly as a somewhat typical, urban middle-class White woman, and tensions between her and this Black father-and-daughter straddle the line between her stated mistrust of anyone regardless of who they are, and biases that dare not speak their name (namely, racism). Director and co-writer Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is ultimately being coy about these themes in this film, until he bumps right up against being heavy-handed.

Because it soon becomes very clear, you see, that Leave the World Behind isn’t so much about an external attack, as we are clearly meant to believe until certain plot reveals, as it is about how Americans will treat each other in times of crisis, and particularly manipulated times of crisis. Very weird things occur that make you wonder whether something otherworldly is occurring: deer keep gathering around certain characters, in unnaturally large groups, as though trying to communicate something. An oil tanker runs aground on the beach. A plane crash is discovered on another beach. An earsplitting alarm blares across the region. A snippet of radio broadcast through static reveals whatever is happening is wreaking havoc on animal migrations.

In one eerie and exciting sequence, a bunch of self-driving Teslas have driven to crash into each other on the highway, thereby blocking the family’s one attempted route back to the city—a place they clearly don’t want to be right now anyway. This is where the mystery is at its greatest: is this an alien invasion, or a machine uprising? This would technically fall under the genre of science fiction, but the science element really takes a back seat to the fiction, which is meant to be just plausible enough to get under our skin.

Leave the World Behind rarely succeeds at getting under my skin, but even at its measured pace for well over two hours, it certainly succeeded at keeping my attention. This is the kind of movie that will be fun to talk about, if not especially intellectually stimulating. There are moments when the script gets a little close to preachy, about our inability to be kind to each other. In the opening sequence and just before the opening credits, we hear Amanda exclaim how much she fucking hates people. Broadly speaking, this movie is a little on the nose. It’s perfectly tailored to be a middle-of-the-road streamer release—indeed, the modern equivalent of a TV movie, with some seriously under-par CGI. I’m not disappointed I didn’t get to see this in a theater, but it certainly passed the time more than well enough at home.

*A quartet of characters trying to ascertain who the real enemy is.*

Overall: B