Monday, January 08, 2024

Review of Leave the World Behind

An unsatisfying dystopian end-of-the-world film, in which a family of white liberals travel to a holiday home in upstate New York for a short break just as there's a cyber attack and associated real attack on the US by unnamed and unspecified enemies. The film illustrates well how fragile our civilisation is and how dependent on a few pieces of technology we've become, and there's some interesting dynamics between the white family and the prosperous black family who own the luxurious holiday-home and turn up to reclaim it as the catastrophe unfolds. 

But there's lots that doesn't make any particular sense and seems just added in for pointless menace...the house is surrounded by oddly courageous deer, for example. And the underlying narrative seems like something from the Qanon playbook - secretive powerful elites, leaflets dropped from planes that are written in Farsi and Korean, and so on.

I was sucked in rather after the fashion of "Lost" (now our reference points for initially intriguing and mysterious narratives that ultimately turn out to be load of meaningless crap), but ended up really disliking this film, despite some good acting and interesting cinematography.

Watched on Netflix.

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