“Leave the World Behind” is an unsettling thriller featuring a series of unexplained phenomena. Director Sam Esmail (“Mr. Robot”), adapting Rumaan Alam’s novel, keeps audiences as clueless as the characters as strange things keep happening. The ambiguities are intriguing, but they also can be so vague that viewers may stop trying to sort out why or what they might mean.
The film opens with Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts) informing her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) that she rented a fabulous house by the beach for an impromptu vacation. Her speech about wanting to get away from people — “because she “f**king hates them” — is pointed, amusing and typical of her sardonic nature. They pack their kids, teenage Archie (Charlie Evans) and tween Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) into the car and head off to Point Comfort.
