Apocalyptic film Leave The World Behind is campfire tale of our times: director Sam Esmail

LOS ANGELES – The apocalyptic thriller Leave The World Behind stars Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as a couple who rent a luxurious home for a weekend getaway.

But their holiday is interrupted when a father and daughter (played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold) show up claiming the home is theirs and seeking refuge in the midst of a global cyber attack that grows more alarming by the minute.

An adaptation of the best-selling book of the same name by Rumaan Alam, the film – which premieres on Netflix on Dec 8 – was written and directed by Sam Esmail, creator of the award-winning cyber-thriller series Mr Robot (2015 to 2019).

It has two American Oscar winners in the cast – Roberts, 56, won Best Actress for the biopic Erin Brockovich (2000); and Ali, 49, took home Best Supporting Actor gongs for the dramas Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018). And it was executive-produced by former United States president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama through their production company Higher Ground.

At a panel discussion following the movie’s recent world premiere in Los Angeles, Alam says his acclaimed 2020 novel was inspired by the anxieties of parenthood.

“There are so many opportunities, when you have a child, to be reminded of how tenuous the bargain of everyday life is.”

The 45-year-old American author, who has two sons aged 13 and 10, says he experienced one such moment when he first put his older son on a school bus.

“Some stranger you’ve never seen before drives this rickety bus. You put your four-year-old on the bus and say, ‘Okay, I’ll see you later’, and you just drive off.

“And you do see them later, but that bargain of letting the person you love the most go out into the world every day is how we all actually live.”

Alam’s book struck a chord with Esmail, who read it in 2020 during a real-life global crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic.

The 46-year-old film-maker has always been a fan of disaster stories. He says: “One reason is it harks back to classic campfire tales where you talk about the things that scare you and, through storytelling, work through that.”

Esmail, who also directed Roberts in the thriller series Homecoming (2018 to 2020), envisioned the story as a disaster movie where the monster is the unknown.

“That’s the connection I had with the pandemic, when we were really in the dark, and it was the not knowing that scared us the most, but also what started to divide us,” says the American writer-director.

However, he took a different approach to the genre in Leave The World Behind.

Disaster films are usually centred on big set pieces and the characters typically are secondary.

He says: “I thought this could be an interesting opportunity to flip that around and make the characters the centre and the disaster elements, more off in the distance.”

And just as with Esmail’s other thrillers, the tone here is deliberately hard to pin down, in part because of the racial and socioeconomic undercurrents when the two families interact.

He says: “If I gave you the typical score that you would hear in a thriller, and we shot it in the typical way, you know where it’s going to go and it takes all the tension out.

“The idea here is to create a tone that’s unique to this story and keeps you off balance just enough to keep you wanting more up until the very end.”

The ambiguous ending will also keep the audience guessing, much as it does in real life.

“The movie is not going to give you easy solutions to how we’re going to survive this. It just makes this proposition and then leaves you with questions – just like in life, where we have to face ambiguity day to day,” Esmail says.

“And just like when we went through the pandemic or any of these other crises, we potentially never get the final answer.”