Movie Research: Leave the world behind

 Hey guys!! Today we will be reviewing and sharing research on the psychological thriller movie “Leave The World Behind” and its conventions

The movie follows a family whose matriarch spontaneously decides to rent out a house for the weekend to get away from the city. After a few suspicious incidents, the owner of the house and his daughter show up because they have no where else to stay. There is constant suspense throughout the movie and we do not find out until the very end that the cause of these incidents is due to the attack and attempted eradication of America. 

The movie had many conventions, most of which added to the purpose of building suspense and anxiety throughout the film

The largest contributor to this was the music decisions. The non digetic music was fit the scene and often had an eerie feeling. A common strategy in the film industry is to use synthetic music as well as string instruments, which many find to be uncomfortable or cause uneasiness in the right context. 

The dialogue of the actors added to not only their character but also the narrative. The youngest daughter rosie is constantly referring to the popular show Friends. They make the audience believe it is just an obsession at first, until Rosie realizes the world is ending yet she is still obsessed with finishing the show, which creeps out the audience. The movie ends with Rosie finding a bunker which could save her and the lives of everyone, yet she decides to spend those moments watching the finale of the show, which is when we realize that Friends is simply a symbol meant to represent humans needs to distract themselves from real life. Another example of dialogue is the wife who is the epitome of anger and anxiety and constantly criticizing and questioning people, and even ends the opening sequence with “I fucking hate people”. She serves as the culmination of negativity as well as consistently feeding the audience uncertainty and almost attempting to put us in that mindset as well. 

The movie also uses a lot of close up shots especially when a character is saying something worrying so that we are sucked into that mindset. 

They also use frequent aerial shots, especially considering that the premise is the state of the world so it makes sense to include those type of shots. In fact, the first shot is an aerial shot of Earth with a floating satellite which ends up foreshadowing the plot of the movie. 

The costuming does not appear represent the typical “end of the world” movie. This is fitting due to the fact that the entire situation is flung on them while they are on vacation, so they have no choice but to wear these vacation clothes. 

An editing aspect that adds to the movie is that it is split into chapters explaining what will happen next. Although this does get rid of some of the uncertainty, it also adds to the suspense since we are anticipating what will happen based off of the vague title. Additionally the titles are written in a blocky red font, which fits the theme

Some aspects that I did like were the attention to detail, especially how each character had a fitting costume and dialogue. The son wore typical teenage boy attire and had a sarcastic, girl crazy attitude. 

I also liked the editing because it was fitting but also feasible for four teenagers to execute with little professional experience. Many of these techniques can be done with beginner user friendly software such as Capcut and Adobe

The aspect that I did not particularly like was the camera skills. Although impressive, would be incredibly difficult and nearly impossible to capture with the cameras in our access

Another aspect was the location. Although they used less than five settings throughout the entire film, each setting was large and very expensive looking, which was a part of the plot considering they are an upper class family. The only location which seemed feasible was the beach, which is something we could perhaps utilize in our project. 

Okay that is my research on this amazing new thriller movie. Stay tuned for the next project!!