Donna Gunter

I just watched a new Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind, starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon, and Mahershala Ali. I had been looking forward to it for several days and thought it had an interesting premise. Boy, I could not have been more wrong. That’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back. It’s primarily creepy music and a slow moving plot where you know only marginally more at the end than the beginning. I love apocalyptic fiction, but this has little character development, a whole lot of speculation, and no real ending or resolution except that Rosie, the 13-year-old daughter, finally gets what she wants. The mom, played by Julia Roberts, is constantly screaming about needing a plan to know how to cope with whatever is going on. A plan for a storyline in this movie would have been nice. The book was apparently a NYT best-seller, but if it’s as bad and unfulfilling as the movie, I don’t know how it achieved that status. Can you tell I’m a little peeved about how misled I was about this movie??? Definitely pass on this one, unless you’re a fan of creepy music. I’d give this one a hard D.