Posted by The movie Leave The World Behind has landed on Netflix, and everyone is puzzled: what happened, what is it based on, and what’s its meaning?
It’s definitely one of the biggest releases of 2023 in the world of movies in streaming. Leave The World Behind landed on Netflix in December 2023 with its fascinating images and its complex plot: the director is Sam Esmail (he’s the creator of Mr. Robot and Homecoming), and the cast includes Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon. However, what really won the spectators was the plot: an ordinary family trying to enjoy a short vacation when all of a sudden, doomsday comes, with a long sequence of inexplicable events happening one after the other.
The movie plot is full of elements and symbols that deserve a dedicated explanation, and you’ll indeed find many articles on the Internet about them. This article wants to focus on the philosophical meaning of the movie: what really happened in Leave The World Behind, what is the movie based on, and what’s its core meaning? We will guide you through the best way to interpret the movie, also using the hints the director shared in his recent interviews.
What happened in the movie, and what is it based on?
First of all, Leave The World Behind is not based on a true story or facts that really happened, despite some of the elements in the plot having references to the real world. The movie is based on the popular book of the same name written by Rumaan Alam and published in 2020: the movie director, Sam Esmail, received an advance copy of the book before the official publication and succeeded in acquiring the rights for the movie adaptation.
The book Leave The World Behind shows what we see in the movie but leaves more elements to the reader’s interpretation. Amanda and Clay rent a house in Long Island and try to enjoy a short vacation, but things get weird almost immediately. There is no cell connectivity, no internet, and no TV signal. While they spend the day at the beach, an oil tanker runs ashore, scaring them. On the first night, G.H. Scott and his daughter Ruth knock at their door, introducing themselves as the homeowners and asking to stay there because of a worrying blackout in the city.
From the day after, things escalated pretty quickly: the GPS and the satellite phones don’t work either; a drone drops red leaflets with “Death to America” written in Persian; self-driving cars start crashing into one another; a violent noise keeps returning, shocking everyone. And Archie, Amanda and Clay’s son, start losing his teeth.
All this happens in the book, too. The difference is that the novel doesn’t provide any possible explanation about it. Although the movie Leave The World Behind puzzled everyone about what happened, director Sam Esmail tried to introduce a possible explanation by adding some elements to the plot. We discover that the blackouts and the missing connectivity are caused by a hacker attack, and we see war scenes in the city in the ending scene. Danny, the character interpreted by Kevin Bacon, suggests it’s an actual war against China or Korea. In contrast, G.H. has a different theory, believing it’s an orchestrated internal action aimed at a coup d’état.
Each of those theories is possible, as neither the movie nor the book provides a final explanation. But that’s precisely part of the meaning we can identify in Leave The World Behind: what message does the film want to convey?
The meaning of Leave The World Behind
Leave The World Behind is about the importance and fragility of our sense of safety, and all the unanswered questions we have reading the book or watching the movie have this precise meaning. In the modern world, we are accustomed to believe we have control over everything, and we take stability and safety for granted. We have lost our natural ability to overcome disasters and ride uncertainty because they’ve not been part of our expectations for years. Therefore, in front of something inexplicable and unexpected, humanity appears like Clay: a “useless man,” as he explicitly admits in front of Danny.
The book Leave The World Behind was published at the end of 2020, during the pandemic that brought up this kind of concern for the first time in many years. Until decades ago, natural disasters, extended wars, or local tragedies were more frequent, allowing humanity to keep always in mind that we can all lose stability and safety at any moment. With that mindset, we can better deal with unexpected events. In contrast, what happened in the last few years showed how humans are now more unprepared for the unforeseen: in front of something we never experienced, we are unable to plan the action, think rationally, and keep fear and frustration under control. Consequently, the result is what we see in the book, the movie, and the real world: we turn against each other, losing the sense of society; we don’t help each other but see the rest of the world as an enemy to defeat.
Leave The World Behind is an interesting theoretical exercise. One of the symbolic characters of the plot is Rose, the little daughter: the way she stays attached to the only thing she cared about in her young life, the iconic TV series Friends, reflects her general awareness. What’s happening is too big for her mind to understand, so she sets a smaller objective: try to keep the balance on the only thing that makes her happy. It’s a primary survival method; its first objective is not to lose our minds. The contrast with what the others are trying to do is apparent: adults are chaotically trying to react to the emergency, often without a clear plan. The result is more chaos, as the ending scene evidently shows. Moreover, focusing on acting takes out our energy, and we lose the chance to work on controlling our emotions: we obsessively believe there must be an action that solves the problem because we cannot accept that right here, right now, probably nothing can be done. Only after the acceptance phase can we focus on our control again.
From this point of view, Ruth’s question to Amanda in the second part of Leave The World Behind is full of meaning: “Why are you like this? What do you get out of being so angry all the time?” It looks like a question asked to our instincts: can we see how we become when we obsessively focus on having an action plan?
