Amanda (Julia Roberts), portrayed as a white liberal misanthrope, immediately distrusts G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha'la) upon their arrival as the Black owners of the rental, with microaggressions and suspicion explicitly tied to race; this dynamic fuels multiple scenes of conflict, bonding attempts, and revelations. A standout line has Ruth advising her father that in collapse, “trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people,” which directly foregrounds identity-based distrust as sage advice and injects anti-white framing into the narrative. Director Sam Esmail adapted the source material with the explicit goal of exploring unconscious biases, classism, and racism, including the change of Ruth to a daughter to add a generational perspective on these themes.

Executive production by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground, along with Obama's script notes emphasizing character empathy, further shaped the story so that white liberal guilt and interracial suspicion become foundational to the human-scale disaster rather than incidental. These choices subordinate suspense and plot coherence to ideological messaging. Audience reception highlighted the intrusion, with backlash centering on the anti-white line and the sense that identity politics had been prioritized over thriller elements, producing a measurable critic-audience gap on the film's handling of its premise.