Leave

The premise is killer. A baby is left in a cemetery, wrapped in a blanket with occult symbols, and decades later, as a young adult, she wants to know where she comes from and why. The mind races at the possibilities, doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem possible to screw up a concept so easy, but Leave manages to do it in two different ways, and it is so frustrating. On one hand, the movie constantly drops the ball in connecting the dots of its own story. It forces the viewer to either overlook massive logical inconsistencies or gaping plot holes. Why would the adoptive parents of the baby (Hunter) tell her about being left in a graveyard covered in a Satanic blankie?!? If there’s ever a time where a lie is better than the truth, I think that’s it. Hunter thinks the singer of a black metal band is her mom, because they were in town on the day she was born, and the singer and her are both Scandinavian … but for that to work, the singer would’ve had to have been 9 months pregnant and performing, and there’s photos of the performance, and the singer is NOT pregnant. How did Hunter miss, you know, HUMAN BIOLOGY? There’s a plot point about a young female member of the family going missing, and then Hunter’s mom dying in a fire, and later on, when it’s revealed that Hunter’s mom survived, it’s insinuated that the missing girl (Liv) died in the fire. But the timelines don’t make sense, because Liv is portrayed as having gone missing BEFORE the fire. Things like this force the viewer out of the movie and into plot reconciliation mode. I’m not here to be a script supervisor, movie; I’m her to watch the damned movie as a finished product. The other issue is that it constantly half-bakes a lot of its ideas, but presents them as complete. Was Hunter left in an occult-adorned blanket and in a graveyard because her mom was into black metal at the time? Cause the movie sure doesn’t say, and that’s the only thing it even hints at. If the patriarch of the family is a misogynistic religious zealot that punished women for having autonomy, why is the aunt still alive? What the hell is up with the wolf cross and the spectral figure that Hunter keeps seeing? Is there a supernatural element here? The movie doesn’t seem able to answer these questions. If it were a movie like Phantasm, where ambiguity is the point, it would be one thing, but Leave is trying to tie everything off, and it can’t even keep the strings from fraying. It’s a shame, because the movie is beautiful to look at, and has a cool concept. Lead actress Alicia von Rittberg does a good job portraying someone trying to answer the questions she has about herself (even if she is terrible at hiding her accent). But at no point does this movie’s script support its actors in any way with good material or a logical story. The mystery, the characters, everything is in service of a script that needed quite a few more rewrites.