One of Netflix’s heavy hitters this Christmas season is right here!
Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon and star in LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND, with Roberts and Hawke playing a couple on vacation when the world falls apart.
Sam Esmail directed this one, adapted from a 2020 novel and it’s due to land on Netflix on 8th December following a short theatrical run.
“A family’s (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke) vacation is upended when two strangers (Mahershala Ali, Myha’la) arrive at night, seeking refuge from a cyberattack that grows more terrifying by the minute, forcing everyone to come to terms with their places in a collapsing world.”
“The disaster genre is one of my favorite genres, and the trick that we did in this film that differs from most disaster films is that in that genre, the focus—the priority of the storytelling—is on the set pieces,” Esmail recently told Vanity Fair. “It’s on the spectacle of whatever the disaster might be for that story, and the characters were secondary to that.”
Esmail continues, “They’re more there to react and become the audience avatar. What I think Rumaan did so well in the novel, and what I tried to capture in the film is to invert that and make the focus be on the characters, and their reaction. The spectacle of the disaster is secondary and off in the distance.”
