There's no more normal

During an unidentifiable cyberattack on the United States, characters in Leave the World Behind go to life-threatening extents to get to the bottom of the disaster. But how much of our time as human beings is lost by trying to find solutions to problems we can’t control?

Based on the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam, Netflix’s latest apocalyptic thriller from Mr Robot’s creator, Sam Esmail, follows the Sandford family who are just looking to get away from the hum-drum of their lives. But, instead of the laid-back holiday they had planned for, the Sandfords are thrown into a state of survival that depends on them joining forces with a stranger and his daughter.

Leave the World Behind is a movie that’s doing more than it needs to be doing. Its culmination of every possible end of the world scenario makes for a film driven more by absurdity than by the sense of unease it's aiming for. But amidst the foggy narrative, the movie does manage to bring attention to what humans do best, which is finding someone (anyone) else to blame.

Whether it's dysfunctional technology, entranced animals, or sonic warfare, we are always looking for something beyond ourselves to act as a scapegoat for whatever mess we've thrown ourselves into. Yet, instead of giving us the easy satisfaction of uncovering and defeating the grand puppeteers behind the attacks, Leave the World Behind ends on a note of consolation and escapism.

Sam Esmail tells GQ that a lot of the movie centers around escaping: “How we deny what's going on, how we have to soothe ourselves, how we have to cope in our own ways with crises”. Having just reached the other side of a global pandemic, it’s not difficult to resonate with what Esmail is getting at. However, while Esmail sees the ending as “something really sweet and innocent”, there is an ominous tone underlying the solace of that final scene.

There are certainly many humanmade devastations that we can and should strive to resolve but, at the same time, there is only so much power we hold. Like the movie says: When it comes to events of social destruction, “the best even the most powerful people can hope for is a heads up”. In the same way that the protagonists in Leave the World Behind felt compelled to find a solution to their fictional catastrophes, we spent much of the first two years of this decade awaiting in vain the death of an undying virus.

Leave the World Behind might not be a narratively sound plot, but its tagline — “There’s No Going Back to Normal” — is a contentious suggestion that sometimes it’s not about living through an apocalypse but rather about learning to live with it.

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