Dan Webster: Star-studded cast play doomsday roles in ‘Leave the World Behind’

Since the 1950s, fueled by the furor of the Cold War, we’ve seen one cautionary tale hit movie theaters after the next. If the foe confronting society wasn’t some radioactive-reanimated dinosaur like Godzilla, it was an army of zombies.

In recent years, though, movies have taken up the cry of Walt Kelly’s cartoon strip “Pogo”: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That sentiment is central to the Netflix release “Leave the World Behind,” an apocalyptic streaming feature directed and co-written (with Rumaan Alam) by Sam Esmail.

Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke star as Amanda and Clay, a Brooklyn couple who, with their two children, impulsively decide to take a short vacation. Their destination? A rural part of Long Island, though still in sight of the Manhattan skyline.

Amanda has arranged a short stay at what turns out to be a mansion, complete with swimming pool. And at first they achieve some sense of peace, which is particularly important for Amanda because she has little patience for humanity.

Their peace, though, gets broken in the middle of the night when someone comes knocking. That someone turns out to be two people, George (or G.H., played by Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la Herrold), the owners of the house that Amanda rented.

Amanda resents such an intrusion, though Clay is more accommodating. She doesn’t believe George’s explanation, which is that he decided to return from the city because of a sudden power outage.

She becomes more irate when George says he wants to void their contract and return home.

It’s clear that along with Amanda’s basic trust issues, her suspicions are aroused because both George and Ruth are Black, something that George ignores but that Ruth picks up and challenges, if at first indirectly.

Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that something more serious than a mere power outage is occurring. And the two families, not too comfortably, have to bond in the face of a situation that no one can explain, much less agree on a plan to deal with.

As the situation becomes more dire, Amanda’s children propel the narrative. Their daughter Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with seeing the final episode of the sitcom “Friends,” disappears. And their son Archie (Charlie Evans) becomes inexplicably ill – leading George and Clay to seek a cure, which leads to a potentially deadly confrontation with George’s neighbor Danny (Kevin Bacon).

With a cast that includes two Oscar-winning actors, Roberts and Ali, and one four-time Oscar nominee – Hawke – you’d expect good acting. And you get it, mostly, especially from Ali. The characters they play, though, are largely stock, from Roberts’ angry woman to Hawke’s overly compliant and possibly philandering college professor.

Director Esmail does have a talent for using fancy camera work, and his use of music – composed by Mac Quayle – continually underscores the film’s overall aura of suspense.

In the end, though, the ultimate point of “Leave the World Behind” seems to be reflected largely in the obstinate navel-gazing by “Friends” fan Rose. She’ll always have Chandler and Monica.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are doomed.