In an early scene in Leave the World Behind, all four members of the Sandford family are crammed into an SUV, headed to a beautiful Airbnb on Long Island to enjoy a mini-vacation. They are technically together as a unit. But as Sam Esmail’s direction of the scene conveys, each of them is tethered to some device that prevents them from bonding with one another.

Amanda (Julia Roberts) gabs on a phone call with a colleague, her earbuds firmly in place. Clay (Ethan Hawke) is driving and rocking out to “Misled,” by Kool and the Gang. Their teenage son, Archie (Charlie Evans), plays video games on his phone. And lastly, their tween daughter, Rose (Farrah McKenzie), is glued to “The One Where the Stripper Cries,” an episode from the tenth and final season of Friends that’s streaming on her tablet. In a bit of foreshadowing of the societal breakdown we’re about to witness, Rose’s video starts buffering. Even her link to Friends is tenuous.

In the book from which this soon-to-turn-apocalyptic cautionary tale is adapted, author Rumaan Alam also makes reference to Friends. But Esmail, who wrote and directed Leave the World Behind, extends the sitcom’s presence in his version of the story, turning it into a running thread that plays a key role in the film’s conclusion and underlines how human beings crave escapism at the expense of embracing the actual present, a different way of “leaving the world behind.” The usage of Friends, which initially seems like a funny riff on how much Millennials and Gen-Zers love that show, turns out to have layers of meaning behind it that resonate even more because the film is being released in theaters and on Netflix at this particular point in 2023.

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The world of Friends indeed existed in a carefully conceived bubble during its ten-year-run. It was set in a simpler, reductive version of New York City where mostly white and straight people lived in surprisingly affordable, large apartments and 9/11 never happened. When Rose spends hours binging entire seasons of the NBC sitcom, she’s creating a similar bubble for herself. That’s what watching Friends does. Its motion-smoothed version of Manhattan is a place you visit while the world burns so you can briefly forget that things are on fire. Rose even says as much herself during a conversation with Archie later in the film. When her brother asks why she cares so much about the people on the show, Rose responds: “They make me happy. I really need that right now.” It’s partly as simple as that: When Rose watches Friends, it feels like things are okay.

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