New disaster movie Leave The World Behind deals with themes that its writer-director, Sam Esmail, finds impossible to leave behind himself. Eight years ago, the filmmaker introduced himself with Mr. Robot – a techno-thriller piece of prestige TV that warned of the ways that society might grow fragmented, unreliable and open to exploitation, the more it hinged on technology. The show ran for four seasons, winning three Emmys along the way. Now, he’s back with another tale that highlights the dangers of digitalism and how quickly our technology-dependent society might be dismantled with the click of a button, or more accurately the right line of hacker code.
Leave The World Behind stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as parents who escape to a Long Island vacation home, only for a stranger and his daughter – played by Mahershala Ali and Myha'la Herrold– to turn up unannounced in the middle of the night, bearing tales of electrical blackouts in New York City. It’s a great watch that keeps you guessing till the very end, punctuated by some incredibly unnerving imagery that will rattle around in your brain for days after. And it speaks very much to anxieties of our time. In the years since Sam created Mr. Esmail, we’ve seen Russia hack the 2016 US election and Cambridge Analytica influence Brexit. We live in a time of global superpowers seeking to disrupt society via digital means. So maybe the question isn’t why Sam would go back to the themes of Mr. Robot. Perhaps the question is: why wouldn’t he?
In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, which covers every important plot point and detail of this great movie, Sam discusses the huge departures made from the Rumaan Alam novel this movie adapts, the meaning of the menacing animals throughout this film, and how the TV show Friends came to be a massive motif running through Leave The World Behind – resulting in one of the best movie punchlines of 2023.
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