Sumith Prasad
In Netflix’s disaster movie ‘Leave the World Behind,’ Clay Sandford meets a woman when he tries to find out what the national emergency is. The woman speaks to him in Spanish about her concerns and seeks his help. Clay, who doesn’t know the language, fails to understand her. After listening to the woman for a while, he eventually tells her that he is helpless and drives away, much to the displeasure of the former. The woman’s words and behavior unsettle Clay, who hasn’t yet confronted the terrors of the calamity at that point. His strange meeting with the person is his introduction to the disaster that threatens the lives of the Sandfords and Scotts! SPOILERS AHEAD.
A Cry For Help
The lady is seeking Clay’s help to return to her house. Like Clay, the woman has gotten lost in the area. She is trying to find a way to return to her home when she sees his car approaching her. When Clay lowers the window of his car, the woman lets him know that she has been walking around for a while in the region and that he is the first person she has seen all day. The lady then asks for Clay’s phone, likely hoping to call a relative to get back to her loved ones. The woman witnessed a few strange occurrences that scared her, which explains her eagerness to get back to her house.
The unnamed woman tells Clay that she saw a plane that was spraying red gas in the region. The lady must be referring to the drone-like entity that drops the red leaflets written in Arabic Clay encounters right after parting ways with her. The woman must have mistaken the machine for a plane and the leaflets for red gas from far away. She also saw an enormous herd of deer when the herbivores were coming out of the woods. In addition, the lady also saw a military plane, which fled after appearing briefly.
These happenings unsettle the woman, which makes her eager to get back to safety. To understand what’s really been happening, she asks Clay whether all of these occurrences are part of a chemical attack. When he finally decides to drive away, she pleads to him to not leave her in the vicinity. She adds that she is scared and doesn’t want to be alone but due to Clay’s inability to understand her, he just drives away.
Two Helpless Individuals
Clay and the lady’s conversation reveals what really happens when a community collapses without technology to support the same. Due to the unavailability of network signals, he fails to call someone for the woman or use a translation tool to understand her. Their interaction indicates that without the help of technology, human beings can only understand the bare minimum or the most basic emotions. “If his [Clay’s] phone had worked, he might have tried Google Translate. […] A different man would respond differently, but Clay was the man he was, one unable to provide what this woman needed, one afraid of her urgency, her fear, which did not need translation,” Rumaan Alam’s source novel of the same name reads, giving more clarity about the significance of the conversation.
In the film, the lady is a random woman Clay meets while he drives around the region. In the novel, however, G. H. Scott considers the possibility of her being his maid Rosa. “G. H. thought of Rosa, who kept their own house in order, whose husband sculpted and tended the hedge, whose children played quietly, sometimes, as their parents worked in the summer heat, pretending not to see the swimming pool, though Ruth had once told Rosa the children were welcome to swim. They never would. It was not in them. Had it been her?” the book reads.
Read More: Leave the World Behind: Is Point Comfort an Actual Town in Long Island?
