‘Leave the World Behind’ Director Sam Esmail Explains His Controversial Ending

[This story contains major spoilers about the ending of Leave the World Behind, now streaming on Netflix.]

Plenty of people tried to talk Leave the World Behind director Sam Esmail out of his film’s controversial ending — even Esmail tried to talk himself out of his film’s controversial ending.

But the filmmaker responsible for projects including Mr. Robot ultimately stayed the course, and now, just as he anticipated, the ambiguous conclusion to his apocalyptic thriller has left audiences divided. Adapted from Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel of the same name, Esmail’s iteration, which quickly topped Netflix’s top 10 list when it debuted Dec. 8, follows Amanda and Clay Sandford, played by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, who take their children Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans) on a weekend getaway to Long Island. While there, the owners of their luxe home rental, GH Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold) return, citing a blackout back in the city. The families, between whom distrust and paranoia mounts, cohabit as society seemingly and eerily unravels around them.

Among the final shots of what Esmail has called a “cautionary tale” is one of the New York skyline erupting in smoke and flames — though what, exactly, is the cause and what will happen after remain elusive. Instead, the film, which counts the Obamas as producers, ends with young Rose watching Friends by herself in a neighbor’s basement bunker. The theme song, “I’ll Be There For You,” plays over the movie’s end credits. By contrast, Alam’s book concludes with Rose gathering supplies from the bunker before she presumably returns to her family. (“There’s no actual explanation offered in either version,” Alam noted earlier this fall. “The difference is that I have access to the ability to tease the reader in a different way than Sam is able to tease the audience.”)

Esmail accurately predicted what might come next. “We knew going into this that the ending was going to be polarizing, but we did not want to pull punches on it,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in mid-November, before the film had been released. “I think in a traditional disaster film, a genre that I’m a huge fan of, so no knock on disaster films — I mean, Day after Tomorrow is one of my favorite movies — but the expectation is at the end of these films, your cast of characters overcomes the disaster and the world reverts back to some sane semblance of normalcy. I knew that I wasn’t going to do that.”

Nevertheless, Esmail’s hope was those intense reactions would lead to conversation, which is precisely what he was after. “As a film lover, I’m excited when I leave a movie wanting to spend hours talking about it. And when you end a film with sort of a pat answer, where the heroes do overcome something, those tend to be the movies where they kind of come and go,” he says, adding: “So we knew making this film that we wanted to go in this provocative way, and we assumed the risk that it would divide people — and hopefully in a good way, because that provokes conversation.”