Leave the World Behind spoilers follow.
When the apocalypse comes, make sure you have your comfort TV at hand.
In Netflix's star-studded dystopian thriller Leave the World Behind, the youngest in the Sandford family, Rose (played by Farrah Mackenzie), goes on her own journey towards escapism while the rest of her family freaks out about a societal collapse in the United States.
Based on the novel by Rumaan Alam, the movie shows how the country is the victim of a cyberattack that cuts all communications and internet connection, creating absolute panic.
The focus stays on two families brought together by the situation, and it's through their perspective that we get glimpses of what's going on: vast ships wrecking themselves on the beach, animals acting weird, Tesla cars herding and crashing due to their automatic pilots going mad and strange foreign propaganda falling from the sky.
However, Rose only has one thing on her mind: watching Friends.
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The pre-teen has been binge-watching the show for weeks, and she's down to the last episode. Unfortunately, there's no Wi-Fi available to stream it.
"I'm never going to find out what happens to Ross and Rachel, am I?" Rose complains to her teenage brother Archie (Charlie Evans).
"What do you care so much about that show anyway?" he asks, baffled by her TV obsession.
"They make me happy. I really need that right now, don't you?" she replies. "If there's any hope left in this f**ked-up world, I wanna at least find out how things turn out for them. I care about them."
In a world where basically everything is lived through a screen, the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurry. For Rose, at that moment, Friends is as real as the end of the world, Ross and Rachel's happy ending as world-altering as a potential civil war.
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For kids today, burdened with an inescapable sense of hopelessness about the future, media has become less of an innocent escape and more of a Matrix-esque place to exist.
In one scene of the movie, Ruth Scott (Myha'la) comments about Rose's obsession with Friends: "It's almost nostalgic for a time that never existed."
There's a term for that: anemoia, feeling nostalgia for a time period you haven't lived through, a simpler time blindly idealised to make sense of our current dissatisfaction with the present. It's a tool for our inner fights against anxiety, loneliness and existential turmoil, but one that too often disconnects us completely from reality.
While adults try to find answers and solutions, the younger characters in the movie have completely given up on the world, with Rose obsessing over a TV show and Archie being a creep by the swimming pool.
They are used to the doomsday scenario by now, anyway.
Although having Rose and Friends' storyline closing the movie could play to comic effect, it's actually quite a bleak ending.
At the beginning of the movie, Rose's mother, Amanda (Julia Roberts), claims to hate people. She quickly organised a chill weekend out of the city, hoping not to be disturbed. However, when society collapses, Amanda grows out of her angry white middle-aged woman persona and regains her humanity, even risking her own life to save Ruth from a group of menacing deer.
On the other hand, there's Rose, who seems like a lovely child but ultimately would rather leave her family behind than leave her favourite show unfinished.
Right before she makes her choice, the TV-obsessed kid tells her mum she can't stop thinking about a West Wing episode.
She remembers a story someone tells the President about how a religious man died in a flood because he refused to take any help he was given, thinking God would save him in the end. He didn't realise the people trying to help him were God's help.
"I think I'm done waiting," Rose says afterwards.
Rose is tired of waiting for the divine hand that will take them out of this mess. If the world is about to end, she might as well finish the damned show.
So she does. In the empty neighbour's house, Rose finds a luxury doomsday bunker big enough for both her family and the Scotts.
There, she finds a massive shelf with hundreds of delightfully nostalgic DVDs, from all seasons of Gilmore Girls to movies like Bridget Jones and Die Hard.
Rose quickly finds Friends' last-season box set and plays it on the TV. Her smile grows at the sound of 'I'll Be There For You' when the opening credits roll.
She'll finally find out what happens to Ross and Rachel!
She might go and find her family later if a bomb hasn't smashed them to pieces yet, but right now, she's in pop-culture heaven.
"To me, it represented pure escapism," director Sam Esmail told Tudum when explaining the film's ending.
"In moments of crisis, when we've lost sight of our common humanity, when we feel isolated, we do want to escape to comfort. And for Rose, I thought her journey wouldn't be complete until she watched the final episode of her favourite show."
"I think as much as this film is a cautionary tale and it's meant to be a warning, it's not meant to give us an answer as to what to do next — but it is meant to say, 'As dark as it could get, as bleak as it can get, we can always strive to find some hope'."
As cautionary tales go, there's one lesson we can take from Rose's subplot: stock up on some DVDs just in case the world ends.
Leave the World Behind is now available to watch on Netflix.
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Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over eight years. Based in the UK, she is a former deputy movies editor at Digital Spy, and previously worked for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas. Mireia's work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema and GamesRadar+ in the UK. She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London. LinkedIn
