When a family takes a spontaneous isolated-house-rental vacation, a curious event at the beach heralds a communications blackout and the arrival of the house-owners fleeing an electrical outage in the city as they piece together the scale of the ongoing disaster. The pairing of Ethan Hawke as the laid-back husband with Julia Roberts as the more forthright and acerbic wife works well here, together with a calm and interestingly unreadable Mahershala Ali as the house-owner and Myha'la as his sharp daughter. From the outset, the movie is constructed to unsettle the viewer through interesting use of sound, camera and visuals - Jordan Peele is very much the obvious touchstone here - as the mystery deepens with various (distant) threats of cyberattacks, terrorism, environmental disaster and apocalyptic events all possibly part of the bigger picture. The film runs out of steam quite early on, but if you feel like a moody, slow-burn apocalyptic character study then Leave The World Behind fits the bill well, otherwise it may test your patience considerably.
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