Netflix’s Leave the World Behind serves up a very privileged apocalypse

polygon.com:

What would a global disaster look like from inside a really, really nice Airbnb? That’s the question posed — and answered, in a fairly gripping way — by Leave the World Behind, a luxe Netflix thriller adapted by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail from Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel. But this isn’t another “eat the rich” (or “lick the rich”) classist fable, in spite of some architectural similarities between its setup (and its actual architecture) and those in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Leave the World Behind gently prods at some racial and economic sore spots, but ultimately, it isn’t about conflict. Its well-to-do characters have more commonalities than differences. It’s a view of what happens when the bubble bursts, seen entirely from inside the bubble.

Amanda (Julia Roberts) is a Manhattan advertising executive, and the city has made her restless and misanthropic. (“I fucking hate people,” she announces at the end of the film’s brisk prologue, as Esmail zooms in on her face conspiratorially.) On impulse, she decides to book a last-minute getaway to a luxury Long Island holiday home for herself and her family: her more laid-back, easy-as-it-comes academic husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), and teenage kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie).

The house she rents is a pristine, modernist palace, a few steps up from their already enviable Brooklyn lodgings. They wander around its vast, glass-walled rooms and its expansive pool, cooing approvingly, feeling comfortable in this newly borrowed station in life. The only sign of trouble in paradise is that Rose loses signal to her tablet on the drive and can’t complete her binge-watch of every episode of Friends. (She doesn’t appear to have noticed that her mom was on the show.)

Bu