Is Leave The World Behind the next Get Out???
Genre: Slow Burn Thriller/Pre-Apocalyptic
Premise: A wealthy white liberal family renting an Air Bnb house in the country has their vacation rocked when a nationwide blackout occurs and an older black couple shows up at their door.
About: Leave the World Behind was a finalist in the 2020 National Book Awards. It quickly became a hot film package, with Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) jumping in to direct and a cast that includes Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali. This is a Netflix production and while Netflix is having their own ‘leave the world behind’ moment, which should affect future productions, I’m sure this one will remain on their slate.
Writer: Rumaan Alam
Details: 256 pages
Was really excited to read this when I heard about it.
I’m always curious what Sam Esmail is working on and this sounded like a juicy-a$$ premise that’s right up my walkway.
Our story follows an upper middle-class Brooklyn family who’s spending a week’s vacation out in the middle of nowhere, a beautiful Air BnB home sitting amongst endless fields and forest. There’s Clay, the college professor father. Amanda, the mother with the cliched vague New York City job. And their kids, 15 year old Archie, and 12 year old Rose. From what we can tell, they are a very normal family.
Not long after they get to the house, there is news of a blackout on the East Coast, and then all phones and television go down. Nobody’s spooked yet but the first bit of fear creeps in when, later that night, an older black couple shows up at their door, George and Ruth. After some initial confusion, George and Ruth explain that they own this house and, while they live in the city, they turned back and came here when they learned of the blackout.
Clay wants to let them stay but Amanda is having none of it. She’s suspicious of the two immediately, even when it’s clear that they possess all the qualities of a cultured affluent couple. But with information on the blackout scarce and it seeming weird to kick two people out of their own house, they agree to let them stay downstairs for the night, until they figure out what’s going on tomorrow morning.
Except the next day only brings more confusion. A drive into town ends up in Clay getting lost. And then the first sign that something really bad is happening occurs – a long loud terrifying indescribable blast of noise. Everybody is legitimately freaked out at this point because nobody can begin to guess what the noise was.
As Clay huddles up with Amanda to figure out a plan, Archie grows sick, vomitting heavily. The group tries to decide if they should take him to the hospital (a full 45 minutes away) and while that decision is put on ice for a while, it accelerates the second Archie’s teeth fall out. It is then that both families learn that something is happening they’ve never seen before. And that the next 24 hours will be critical in figuring out – WHAT. DO. THEY. DO. NEXT?
So, to answer the question, “Is this the next Get Out?”, the answer is, sadly, no. And I say ‘sadly’ not because it tries to be and fails. But because it never tries at all. And, in my opinion, it should’ve been trying with all its might. Because when I left a comment on the Thursday post that I’d be reviewing this book, I’d just completed reading the hook of the story – a mysterious older black couple shows up on the steps of a liberal white family’s remote Air BnB.
It’s a delicious setup for so many reasons. First of all, you have this well-off white liberal New York family who claims to be the very essence of inclusive, yet from the moment the black couple show up, they’re suspicious of them, not entirely because they’re black, but at least partly so.
When it’s revealed that George and Ruth are the owners of the home, things get even more interesting. Think about how clever this setup is. You’ve rented a house – already given the owners their money. The end of the world may be happening. But then the owners show up. Whose house is it, at this moment? It’s a question on everyone’s mind but they’re all too polite to demand an answer. And since nothing drastic has happened yet, it’s a question they don’t have to deal with for the time being.
The promise of that question needing to be answered, though, is the very reason you keep reading. You just know these two families are going to go at it at some point.
Except that never happens.
If we were to measure the level of conflict between these two families over the course of the story (on a scale of 1 to 10) it never reaches above a 3. The families get along just fine, almost to an annoying degree. All I could think while I was reading this was, holy Moses did you miss out on a great opportunity.
Maybe the author didn’t want to go in the obvious direction of exploring a racially-charged conflict between a black and white family. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore any conflict between them whasotever! Conflict is drama. Drama is entertainment. Why would you actively avoid entertainment in a story?
Even the way that George and Ruth are introduced implies a story rife with mysteries and secrets about these two that will be revealed in time. Alas, there are no secrets. They’re just a normal wealthy couple who think and do normal things.
Once I realized that that wasn’t what the book was about, I was upset. But I eventually came around since I understood that this was more a meditation on family, specifically a well-off liberal white family, coming to the realization that all the things they held dearest and thought were important turned out to be useless when the shit hit the fan.
One of the featured chapters in Leave The World Behind has Clay driving into the nearby small town to see if he can gather information about what’s going on. Except all phones and GPS are down. So he quickly gets lost. All these country roads look exactly the same. Clay starts panicking, stopping his car at one point and internalizing that there’s a very real chance that he may never be able to ever find the house again.
This is when the book worked best, when it was dealing with our over-reliance on technology. Which made it all the more frustrating that it wasn’t able to find that same level of commentary when racial matters were involved. Amanda would occasionally think things such as, if George and Ruth were white, they never would’ve let them inside the house. But it was the guilt they felt at being perceived as racist that caused them to let the black couple in, a choice that had complicated an already complicated situation.
But these moments often lacked thematic continuity. In that aforementioned chapter of Clay driving around, his trip is punctuated by seeing a Mexican woman in a maid’s uniform flagging him down from the road. He stops for her and she starts crying to him, babbling in Spanish. Clay has had plenty of Mexican people clean his house and landscape his lawn. But he realizes he’s never actually talked to any of them and therefore has no way of understanding the woman, so he eventually just drives off.
I know there’s something being said here but what is it? White people pretend to care about minorities but when the shit hits the fan they don’t? Maybe it’s a commentary, specifically, on liberal hypocrisy? Except Clay never acts that way towards George, a man he quickly gains respect for. I don’t know. It was mushy.
Despite this, the script has a few plot beats that keep things fun. We get these big scary noises that rock everybody to their core, so we’re wondering what the hell those are. And the chapter that really got me was when Archie’s teeth fell out. I was putting myself in these parents’ shoes thinking, “What an absolute nightmare.” I mean, what do you do at that point? You’re in the middle of nowhere. You realize there are no doctors available to you. You have something happen to your child for which there is no reference point. That’s when I realized they were really screwed and I wanted to find out how this ended.
I’m not going to spoil the ending here but I will say it will be interesting to see if Sam Esmail keeps this ending or writes a new one. I suspect he’ll write something new. I just don’t think the current ending is the kind that will give a movie audience satisfaction.
But I do understand what Esmail saw in this. It’s a weird book and while it didn’t do what I thought it was going to do, the combination of it being thought-provoking and terrifying leads me to think it’ll work well as a movie. Especially with someone as talented as Esmail behind the camera.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Fear operates in the absence of information. The more information you give the reader, the less afraid they’ll be. It’s why a shark was so terrifying to a summer community in 1974 and it’s why these families’ situation is so terrifying in 2022. It’s risky, as a writer, to keep all the answers to yourself. But unless you have amazing answers that will shock an audience to its core, consider doing what Alam did, and keep everything close to the vest for as long as possible.
