A glutton for punishment, last weekend I watched two end-of-the-world movies: Leave the World Behind and Love and Monsters. (Yes, my social life leaves a lot to be desired.)

Leave the World Behind stars four wonderful actors, Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and in a supporting role, Kevin Bacon. Early one morning, Amanda (Roberts) and Clay (Hawk) leave their NYC apartment with their teenagers and head to a vacation home at a nearby beach.  Opening scenes are captivating: the city skyline, the shoreline vistas, and the spectacular rental home. However, in juxtaposition to the visual beauty, we hear eerie, atonal, background music. The relentlessly ominous score telegraphs that this family is about to experience a horrific event.

 Starting a movie with such intense foreboding messes with the narrative arc. When you create tension that high at the beginning of a story, it’s tough to continue to increase the intensity. The viewer tends to become numb to the sustained high intensity. This movie depicts terrifying events. We viewers should feel that terror, yet the overall tone of the film seemed muted and flat.

On many occasions characters delivered their lines in an emotionless, robotic way. You can hear an example of this in the first scene when Amanda tells Clay how rough the year has been and that she went online and booked a getaway at the beach, starting that morning. Her words possess a staccato quality and sound more like a speech than a conversation. She is a skilled actor, so I’m assuming this style is an intentional choice of the director. Even Amanda’s children deliver their lines in a similar way. An exception is to this style is Kevin Bacon. He plays a bad guy survivalist with great gusto who delivers his menacing lines with manic glee.

 The characters experience horrific events that would have caused me to be bug-eyed and screaming, but Amanda, Clay, and G.H. Scott. (played by Ali) seem either in denial or in shock. I don’t want to include plot spoilers, but suffice it to say, while the world is literally and figuratively on fire, those three characters react more like distant observers rather than front row participants at the of the end of their life as they know it.

G.H. owns the luxurious vacation home that Amanda and Clay are renting. When G.H. and his daughter, Ruth, show up in the middle of the night, Amanda and Clay do not give them a warm welcome. Amanda acts especially hostile and suspicious.

At this point, the film lightly touches on racism. Forced to bunk in the basement of a house they own, Ruth tells G.H. that she is angry about the racist way Amanda and Clay are treating them. G.H. doesn’t say much.

Later, after getting to know the Scotts better, Amanda states that she hates all people. Is Amanda attempting to excuse her initial racist behavior and remarks by saying she hates all people equally? I wish the film explored the issue with more depth. Regardless, Julia Roberts does a great job of portraying Amanda as a thoroughly unlikeable character.

Would I recommend this movie? Maybe.

I wanted to care about the characters more than I did. Each one felt off putting, even the children. I wished each one would have displayed a more visceral response to what was happening. The end did not satisfy. When the credits started to roll, both my husband and I said, “Wait! What?”

On the other hand, perhaps the creators of this film intended for it to be understated. Maybe that was the whole point, and I missed it. I am reminded of the line from a T.S. Eliot poem:  This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

The bottom line? I haven’t stopped thinking about the movie since I viewed it. So, maybe that makes the film worth watching.

LOVE AND MONSTERS

Love and Monsters is set in a post-apocalyptic world where oversized insects, reptiles, and sea creatures terrorize the few humans left alive on earth. The main character, Joel, shelters underground in cramped, dark quarters with his small colony.

By all counts, Joel’s life is grim. At the onset of the global disaster, he loses track of Aimee, the love of his life. Soon after, his parents are eaten by oversized termites. To make matters worse, Joel lacks survival skills. He invariably freezes when faced with dangerous vermin, so he’s never allowed out to defend the compound Joel stays underground where he is revered as the guy who makes a terrific minestrone.

 One night, via short wave radio, Joel discovers that Aimee lives in a colony eighty miles away. He decides to make the trek to her, even though everyone in his community tells him that he has no chance of surviving the trip.  Besotted with love, he leaves anyway. On his quest, he’s joined by a stray dog and later by an unlikely pair of guides who give him some survival pointers, but most importantly, a grenade, which comes in handy. After battling gargantuan land and aquatic creatures, Joel reaches his destination but doesn’t find what he expected. What does he find? No plot spoilers here. You’ll just have to watch the movie to see what happens.

Even though this film is unapologetically absurd, I appreciated the emotional depth portrayed in the main characters. The ending is refreshing and fun, although a tiny bit predictable, if you pay attention to foreshadowing.  Joel’s self-effacing humor and the preposterous situations he encounters makes this story feel like a light romp through the ashes of civilization. This movie provided me with a warm-hearted distraction from life.

***

So, if you have time on your hands, as I did last weekend, which move should you watch? Maybe both. Leave the World Behind provides plenty of food for thought and Love and Monsters delivers a fun, lite dessert.