Now that the millennium has passed into history and even the Mayan prophecies of 2012 are a distant memory, what does the next apocalyptic horizon look like in American culture? That’s an answer several films have set out to answer over the last year, and Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind is one of the most evocative and open-ended. We start with echoes of September 11 – a silhouette of the New York skyline, Freedom Tower accentuated by a rising sun, along with a solitary plane making its way across the ether – before meeting an upper middle class family as they depart the city for a small town in Long Island for their summer holiday. Amanda Sandford (Julia Roberts) works in marketing, Clay Sandford (Ethan Hawke) is a media scholar and their children Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) seem fairly nonplussed by the holiday – that is, until an amorphous “event” shuts down digital communication and traps them in their bucolic hamlet indefinitely. While this event has some putative causes, they remain speculative, and it largely plays out as a series of surreal tableaux that the Sandfords are unable to parse, especially without phone reception.   

In other words, Leave the World Behind sees the Sandfords doing what so many other characters in American cinema seem to be doing at the moment – waiting for the end of the world. To that end, Esmail leans into a brand of Airbnb horror, or perhaps more accurately, an Airbnb uncanny, that has become prevalent in recent American films, from The Rental to Barbarian to Sick, as the very idea of hearth and home starts to feel like borrowed time. For the Sandfords are first alerted to the catastrophe on the horizon when the doorbell rings in the middle of the night, and George Scott (Mahershala Ali) and daughter Ruth Scott (Myha’la) introduce themselves as the owners of the house, and request permission to shelter in place there. This is the very definition of uncanny and unhomely – the original owners (or so it seems) of an Airbnb returning to reiterate that you are staying in someone else’s home – and it’s enhanced by the fact that the Scotts are both black and wealthier than the upper middle class Sanfords, causing Amanda to insist, in a moment of acute class consciousness, that they live in Park Slope rather than Sunset Park. Simply by appearing, the Scotts dismantle the good life tableau that the Stanfords have built around themselves, as Clay tacitly acknowledges shortly after they arrive. Moving to another room to confer with Amanda about whether they should be allowed to stay, he tells them to “make yourselves at…” only to abruptly trail off.

This dismantling of the good life quickly extends to the entire town, as it becomes clear that the event, which George soon diagnoses as a cyberattack, has trapped the two families in the analog backwater of an older kind of feelgood topos. A classic Netflix aesthetic resurges – arabesque drone shots, a pellucidly pristine pastoral – but only as a reflection of a world that has been lost, or as a symptom of the loss of connectivity, which heightens the visual awareness and apprehension of every character in the house. Despite their growing schisms, they’re united by continually scanning the foliage through windows, especially around the backyard, much as the only remaining phone functionality comes with the camera, as we learn in a scene that sees Archie taking covert close-up photographs of Ruth, which Esmail intercuts with Archie scanning the landscape through his windshield in the absence of GPS.

By the end of the first chapter, the experience of sight itself has become synonymous with a return of a repressed global trauma that can only be conceived by gazing intently at the middle distance. Esmail frequently cuts to characters suddenly taken aback, overwhelmed by the sight of something just offscreen, or too big or amorphous for the screen, in a kind of spiritual companion piece to Birdbox, a concatenation of sight and looming trauma. With the surrogate perception of digital media removed, the characters are brought up against the blunt facticity and opacity of the material world, as in an incredible scene in which the irrefutable fact of an oil tanker ploughs its way towards the Long Island shoreline. This material visuality soon manifests itself at a planetary scale, prompting the central signature of the film – hemispherical shots from one horizon to another that trace the curvature of the earth, and are replicated in the design of the promotional poster, which depicts an endless road curving away from the viewer. While George turns out to be an intelligence expert we don’t learn all that much about his job except that it conforms to this same curve: “In my line of work you have to know the patterns that shape the world – you have to read the curve.”  These curvaceous motifs become ever more eccentric, as when Esmail shifts from a shot of the earth eclipsing the sun from the US moon landing site to a side-on shot of Amanda in bed as Archie puts a cylindrical glass of water on the bedside table that bends and warps her face.

As the film proceeds, the various “events” that comprise the cyberattack draw attention to the hemispherical bowl of the sky in particular – the ship taking up more and more of the horizon, a series of planes crashing on the beach, a drone dropping pamphlets intoning “Death to America” and George’s speculations that satellites have been taken out across the globe. It’s at this point that Leave the World Behind starts to shift into cli-fi, and the cyberattack becomes a mere facet of a more diffuse global event that renders all the characters acutely aware of micro-changes in the composition and flow of the air above them. In most American cinema the sky is a void, in the same way that the ocean only manifested as the absence of land in some Ancient Greek poetry, but here it quickly turns ino a medium for an unbearable auditory “signal” that tortures eardrums, shatters glass and rips leaves from branches, glitching the woods and their classic Netflix aesthetic with the signature red fields of the Netflix brand. Some of the characters speculate that a sonic boom has occurred, although what aircraft might have broken the sound barrier above them remains unknown.

Of course, this aerial fixation echoes 9/11 while simultaneously segueing it into more contemporary fears about climate change. As the chapters of the film proceed, the twin traums of the World Trade Centre and heating skies converge into a new era of aerial precarity that further evolves the frozen debilitated gazes engendered by the September 11 attacks. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, this aerial trauma gestures towards the air disasters and disappearances that have taken on such prominence in the popular consciousness over the last decade, turning the sky into a more precarious place than ever before. Hanging over it all, in Leave the World Behind, is the question of whether George’s wife’s plane has gone down. Scheduled to fly home that weekend, she remains suspended in an increasingly volatile and notional ether that no longer quite exists. In an effort to recover it, the characters increasingly direct their gazes upwards, as Esmail’s hemispherical camera movements grow more vertiginous, evoking the earth shifting and heaving upon its axis. By the final chapter, the planet itself seems to be mobilising or resisting in some way: “the animals are trying to warn us – they know something, they know something they we don’t.”

In the face of that inconceivable catastrophe, the characters and the film can’t help but retreat to outdated modes of feel-good insularity, even or especially now that they have been proven ineffective at keeping the outside world at bay. If anything, the impending apocalypse makes these fantasy spaces register even more as fantasy, whether a kitchen chat in the middle of the night, one of the perennial warm and fuzzy topoi of the 90s, or a heightened attention to the décor, layout and trappings of the house, which could be transplanted straight out of a Nancy Meyers film. One arm of the Netflix brand has sought to remediate these glossy feel-good tableaux within its own pristine hi-definition aesthetic, but since that Netflix homeliness has been progressively dismantled over the course of the film, the characters find themselves groping towards pre-streaming television as their only viable flight from the present. This is especially the case with Rose, who tells her parents stories from The West Wing, stories they’ve heard and watched many times before, as a comfort object, conjuring as it does a beneficent government that can handle most crises in a humane way.

However, Rose’s main source of pre-streaming feelgood comfort is not The West Wing but Friends, a series that seems more distant, alien and antisocial as the years pass by. The cyberattack occurs as Rose is in the midst of “The Last One,” the Friends finale, which remains paused for the entire duration of the film. Rose is especially fixated with what happens to Ross and Rachel, the consensus-building moment of the series when it aired but in retrospect the toxic core of its steadfast refusal to concede a future to any but the most conservative of trajectories. Yet even as Ruth tells Amanda that her daughter is nostalgic for a world that never existed, and even as the second “signal” cracks the screen of the frozen episode as the characters collectively realise that “there is no going back to normal,” Rose clings to the fantasy of “The Last One,” along with the deeper and more constitutive fantasy of pre-streaming television, or even television itself;, that our serialised world can never really end.

Hence the extraordinary final sequence, in which a tracking-shot takes us from an aerial perspective of New York burning on the horizon, down to a neighbouring house, then into a dining room table with a Norman Rockwell poster in the background, and finally into a bomb shelter, where Rose has discovered a DVD cabinet with a box set of Friends. Oblivious now to the needs of her family, she slots in the disc and begins “The Final One” as Esmail’s own credits roll to the Rembrandt’s “I’ll Be There For You.” In that incredible closing conjunction, reminiscent of the “Singin’ in the Rain” outro to A Clockwork Orange, Esmail collapses his apocalyptic vision into the feelgood infrastructure that was meant to fortify America from it, transforming promises of the good life into relics of a fantasy future that could never exist.