The Best Romantic Comedy About The End Of The World Just Hit Netflix

What would you do if you knew the world was ending in a manner of weeks? Hunker down with loved ones? Go about your day-to-day? Recklessly abandon all rules of decent humanity and ride out your final weeks in unabashed debauchery? In Lorene Scafaria’s sweetly funny anti-romantic comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which hit Netflix this month, all of these activities are fair game.

Steve Carell plays Dodge, a hapless insurance broker whose wife leaves him three weeks before the asteroid is scheduled to collide with Earth. His friends, a couple played by Rob Corddry and Connie Britton, aren’t much help; they, like the rest of the people around Dodge, seem to revel in the fact that the imminent end of days allows them to expose their true colors: telling their kids to fuck off, opening up their marriage, and trying heroin. In one of the most brilliant sequences in the film, an End of the World party (in which Amy Schumer, Patton Oswalt, and Melanie Lynskey all play characters in attendance) devolves into a cruel display of hedonism in which recklessness and poor choices become the norm because, after all, who cares?

Dodge does, though — he still manages to go to work and keep cleaning supplies in stock despite the existential crisis silently brewing brewing under the surface. It’s in one of those moments of self-reflection, as he takes stock of his choices, that he decides to set out and find the love of his life: his high school sweetheart, Olivia, from whom he receives a letter saying that she never stopped loving him. Along for the ride is Penny, a perfectly charming (if a bit overwhelmingly quirky) British woman named Penny (played by Keira Knightley), to whom he promises access to a plane so that she can return across the pond to see her family.

The film then turns into a sort of a road movie, with the obvious twists and turns. They run into suicidal truckers, stop at a faux-Friendly’s that’s been overrun by the exuberant, Ecstasy-dropping wait staff, and one of Penny’s ex-boyfriends, who has planned to ride out the apocalypse in an underground bunker with assault rifles. Amid the expected self-reflection, Dodge also begins to fall for Penny. It’s a romantic comedy, after all — it’d be almost a cheat if the pair didn’t begin to express affections for each other.

But Scafaria’s film, while, at times, weighed down with the trappings of a straight-forward romantic comedy, does hold some surprises. There’s a welcome sweetness in the third act that cuts down on all the bitterness seen in the first half of the film, which plays gruesome deaths and misanthropy for cheap (and effective!) laughs. Considering the film’s natural dark premise, there’s plenty of reflection about the meaning of life, but delivered in a way that feels light and breezy compared to, say, the previous year’s apocalyptic psychological drama, Melancholia.

I found it rather baffling why Seeking a Friend came and went so quickly; perhaps its tone is too much for some audiences. But for me, the film is a sweet and hilarious film that asks some big questions — without the pretentiousness of letting you know how serious it is. And its leading couple play perfectly with each other (with Carell in a somber role, playing straight man against a very funny Knightley). Come for the cast, the hilarious minor roles played by the funny people you love, but stay for the genuinely heartfelt moments that make even the imminent destruction of the planet seem, well, as good as an excuse as any to celebrate life itself.

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Photos: Everett Collection