Netflix’s new thriller Leave the World Behind may be a pretty stressful choice for holiday season viewing, but that didn’t stop the film from ascending the streamer’s Top 10 charts since its Dec. 8 premiere. The star-studded film follows a family — Amanda, Clay, Archie, and Rose (Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Charlie Evans, and Farrah Mackenzie, respectively) — as they rent a vacation home in Long Island.
But their plans to “unplug” get uncomfortably literal when Wi-Fi and phone service go down. No one is more disappointed than daughter Rose, who desperately wants to finish the Friends series finale but can no longer access it on her iPad.
“Please fix this,” Rose begs her mom. “I have incredible anxiety about how they’re gonna wrap up the show.” (So real!)
Meanwhile, the family who actually owns the home, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la), returns and confirms that things are getting weird out there. Yet as the two families try to survive the disturbing, world-changing events around them — piercing noises, crashing vehicles, spontaneous illness — Rose’s passion for Friends doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Her resolve to finish the show is only amplified, leading to the film’s truly surprising (and relatable) ending.
To understand the movie’s final moments, let’s first look back at all the Friends references. Major spoilers ahead.
Can We Visit Central Perk?
On the drive to their rental, Rose is watching Friends on her iPad when she asks her dad if they can visit the coffee shop from the show. “I don’t think that’s real, honey,” he says. “It’s just a set.”
He’s right: Friends was filmed on a Warner Bros. soundstage — and while you can visit a version of it in Burbank, California, it’s definitely not in “the city” as Rose believes.
But the brief exchange introduces a key theme of the film: wanting to retreat to a place that doesn’t really exist — not the way you imagine, anyway. The very title of the movie is pulled from the rental listing Amanda finds online, and the subsequent events prove that you can’t truly, well, leave the world behind.
Later in the film, Ruth also touches on this idea when she tells Amanda that Friends is “almost nostalgic for a time that never existed.” It’s a facade — one with a stark lack of diversity and a blissful ignorance of the reality of Manhattan real estate. Even though Friends may be fake, it certainly stirs real action in Rose.
The Deer!
Animals behave weirdly in Leave the World Behind. At one point, there’s a huge flock of flamingos in G.H.’s pool. So the presence of a bunch of deer probably isn’t an intentional Friends connection, but given all the Friends nods throughout the movie, I couldn’t help but think of Ross and Emily’s trip to Vermont in Season 4.
“I gotta go,” Ross tells his friends on the phone. “There’s a deer just outside eating fruit from the orchard!”
Rose is bothered by her brother’s nonchalant reaction to her seeing “a f*ck lot of deer” — a frustration she repeats when explaining to Archie why she must finish Friends. “[The characters] make me happy. I really need that right now,” she says. “Don’t you? If there’s any hope left in this f*cked up world, I want to at least find out how things turn out for them. I care about them.”
The Last One
In the film’s final moments, Rose finds shelter in a fully decked-out bunker with food, furnishings, and, most importantly, a wall full of DVDs — Friends included.
She finds Season 10, navigates her way through the old-fashioned DVD menu, and smiles as she turns on Friends final episode, “The Last One,” and hears The Rembrandts theme song: “So no one told you life was gonna be this way…” before the film cuts to the credits.
The song choice is darkly fitting, considering the apocalypse going on outside, and ending the movie with a light moment from a sitcom feels weirdly relatable because who hasn’t turned to a comfort show to get through a difficult time?
In Rose’s case, Friends doesn’t represent willful ignorance of the calamities outside. After all, she was the first person in her family to notice the out-of-control ship crashing into the beach, and at the end, she was brave enough to weather the danger outside and find better shelter. So, her obsession with a TV show actually saved her family. (That is, assuming Rose is able to bring them all back to the shelter after Friends is over.)
Writer and director Sam Esmail told Vulture that Rose “just wanted to grasp at something that felt pure to her, and she couldn’t get it with her family.”
Rumaan Alam, who wrote the 2020 novel Leave the World Behind is based on, told Variety that he’s a fan of the ending — which doesn’t appear in the book. “I don’t think it’s a joke on Rose. I don’t think it’s a joke on the audience. I don’t think it’s a joke on Friends,” he said. “It’s a reminder that art is kind of a salve.”
