This Leave the World Behind review starts with a moment midway through the film — and one line that changes how you watch everything after it.
“We’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.”
She says it with the detached clarity of someone who has spent her career studying people — not out of warmth, but because understanding people well enough is how you sell them things they don’t actually want. It’s a strange kind of self-awareness: she knows exactly what she’s doing, and she does it anyway.
That line landed differently for me than the rest of the film. The collapse happening outside — the blackouts, the drones, the unexplained signals — functions as backdrop. The real subject is whether people, stripped of their routines and devices, will choose honesty or keep the performance going.
The answer the film gives isn’t flattering.
Director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot*, a TV series about a hacker dismantling financial systems from the inside) leans into Kubrickian* tension throughout — slow zooms, an unsettling score, compositions that feel slightly wrong in ways you can’t immediately name. It works more often than not. Where the film falls short, for me, is in its character dynamics. The relationships between families feel like they’re building toward something that Spielberg or Kubrick would have paid off more precisely. It gets close. It doesn’t quite land.
But that monologue does.
My take: What Amanda describes — collective self-deception dressed up as virtue — isn’t just a social observation. Markets run on versions of it all the time. Paper straws and ESG labels* can coexist with behavior that contradicts them entirely. The gap between what investors say they believe and what they actually do with money is one of the most consistent patterns in finance. Leave the World Behind won’t teach you how to close that gap. But it names it clearly, which is rarer than it sounds.