Netflix releases "Leave The World Behind", the first movie made exclusively by people who have never met a human, seen a movie, or done anything aside from sit in a little concrete room for a hundred years ( warning)

If you're looking for the ultimate cynical Netflix movie -- made entirely to suit the whims of an algorithm that no single person on Earth has any control over, or even understands -- forget "Bird Box" or "How My Sister's Boyfriend Fingered Me, Part 3" or whatever, because now they have this.

I don't really understand what happened here. Nothing in the movie makes any sense, and not in a deliberate or stylistic manner. The movie opens with Julia Robert's uncanny valley face speaking a stream of bullshit to her husband Ethan Hawke about how she's booked a last-minute weekend getaway for them and the kids, starting right that moment. She explains to her spouse in detail her motivation for doing this, including saying the words "I've been stressed with my job" (as if her husband of thirty years needs to be informed of her character backstory), a monologue that culminate in her bizarrely looking out the window while the camera 70s-zooms into her inexpressive face saying "I hate people". What seems to be the sort of thing you'd dream when you have cholera is also apparently an appropriate jumping off point for the plot.

Nobody involved in any stage of making this movie has directly met a human being, and has only had them vaguely described to them. What results is a fascinating approximation of human life, like an alien's best attempt at a domestic tableau. Dialogue sounds like it's been Google translated from English to French to Mandarin and then back to English. Julia Roberts's character - an advertising executive in New York in 2023 with a progressive professor husband -- is supposedly so racist that she cannot fathom that a black man owns real estate or nice clothes (because if you're going to have black characters in any capacity, the movie has to become a race commentary lest a Vulture writer denounces it).

The movie's about a vague apocalypse in which electronics and mechanical things stop working properly. In one scene, the supposedly human family is laying on the beach. In the distance, they notice a huge tanker ship is facing towards the beach head-on. The scene goes on. Character comment on the fact that the ship is getting closer, but laugh it off. Sometimes we cut back to the ship - it's getting closer, but slowly. Then we cut again to some time later, family still on the beach. Suddenly, the MASSIVE ship is mere metres from the beach and not stopping. It is only then that anyone decides to move out of the way, with seconds to spare, because that's literally the only way to make a huge slow-moving ship on the water have any real threat to people on land.

In the book it's based (I assume this was adapted via having someone mumble the book aloud to someone half-asleep, then asking that person to write a script) a point is made to highlight how the characters don't respond appropriately to end-of-the-world events. Someone mysteriously falls ill and their teeth fall out? Better bake a cake to keep everyone calm. That incongruity is deliberate, in the book, to point out how there's no way to appropriately respond to the end times. Here, the same sort of thing happens, but because the character have never said or done anything that remotely resembles realistic human thought processes you're forced to assume this is more of the same.

The director struggles to decide how to shoot each scene, and as a result he uses every possible camera movement (pans, oners, zooms, quick cuts, tracking) during and between sequences, mimicking a child with access to After Effects just using every default transition and wipe that comes free with the software. This is an established director who apparently has fans.

Overall, there is something uncomfortably 'off' about the whole movie. Frame by frame, it looks and seems like a real movie. But it's not. it's a movie held up to a mirror, the creepy doppleganger of a movie (the kind kept locked in the basement like a goblin while the real twin gets to be in the world). I recommend it for that alone.