If there are several scenes from the latest Netflix film “The World After Us” that leave one wary, the one with the deer in the forest is one of the strangest.
The World After Us is the Netflix film everyone is talking about right now. This apocalyptic thriller with Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali divides subscribers with its open ending and its multiple possible interpretations.
It must be said that its director, Sam Esmail, to whom we already owe the excellent series Mr. Robot, likes to play with his spectators. Even though he is adapting an award-winning novel, he had fun slipping strange and sometimes absurd scenes into his film, which left some subscribers wary. And among them, the one with the deer and does in the forest.
We are towards the last third of the film. While Ali and Hawke’s characters go to visit Kevin Bacon to find a cure for the radioactivity in the air, Amanda and Ruth go looking for Rose. As they head deeper into the forest, GH’s daughter ends up coming face to face with a group of deer and does.
The tension is palpable: why do animals react like this? What do they want? Are the two women in danger? You have to count on the composure of the mother to make them leave. But this scene is not there for nothing, especially since it is edited in parallel with the one where we see Kevin Bacon threaten Mahershala Ali with a weapon… and vice versa.
We asked the question directly to the director of the film:
“Unlike the scene with the Teslas, the one with the deer is in the books. This is a passage that really struck me. When I start working on a film, what matters most to me is not the script or the logic, but rather the tone. I see The World After Us as a nightmare. This scene should be seen as a warning: there is something frightening about a group of deer looking straight at you. It works perfectly with the rest of the film.
We can also say that this scene is an ecological consequence of the environmental disaster that is currently playing out. The cyberattack may have affected animal migration. Nature warns us that something is happening. And instead of listening, we prefer to use technology to save us when it has already abandoned us. It’s a mix of all that really. But above all I wanted to highlight the fact that the characters are living a real nightmare.”
A true pamphlet on our relationship to technology and the world around us, The World After Us can also be seen as an ode to nature and ecology.