If you’ve finished Netflix’s Run Away, you’ll know the ending doesn’t give you the comfort you might expect. Paige is alive. The mystery is solved. But instead of relief, you’re left with a question, especially when Simon looks straight into the camera in the final shot.
That uneasy feeling is exactly what creator Harlan Coben wanted. And it all links back to one key creative decision: Building the story around a cult.
At first, the Beacon of the Shining Truth feels worlds away from Simon Greene’s life. He’s a wealthy dad with a good job, a nice home, and children at a private school.
So why bring a remote cult into it at all?
via Netflix
Speaking to Tudum, Coben explained that the idea fascinated him because of how belief can be twisted.
“There’s a certain fascination with that kind of brain manipulation, if you will, and that sort of obsession, believing what’s not necessarily so,” he said.
For Coben, the cult wasn’t just there for shock. It was a way of exploring control, secrecy, and how far people will go to protect the story they’ve told themselves.
He also liked how different worlds collided in Run Away. The comfortable, privileged life of the Greene family sits alongside addiction, violence, and the insular world of Shining Haven.
“What could they have to do with a cult that’s way in the outskirts of society?” Coben said. As it turns out, everything.
So what’s the thing that will never leave Simon and Paige?
via Netflix
By the final episode, Simon and Paige uncover the darkest truth of all. Aaron wasn’t just Paige’s boyfriend. He was her half-brother. And Ingrid didn’t just kill someone to protect her daughter, she killed her own son. And yet, Simon and Paige agree to keep that secret.
That choice is what truly defines the ending. There’s no explosion, no confession, no justice served. Just silence.
Coben has been clear about the impact of that decision. “That’s going to haunt them the rest of their lives, both of them,” he said.
James Nesbitt, who plays Simon, explained that the final look to camera is meant to capture that exact feeling. “Right at the very end, I look down the lens as if to say, ‘What do I do now?’” he said.
The point, though, isn’t finding an answer. It’s sitting with the discomfort.
Writer Danny Brocklehurst agrees, saying the ending leaves space for the audience to think for themselves. “It treats the audience with an intellectual respect to have their own opinion,” he said.
For Brocklehurst, Simon and Paige’s shared look across the dinner table says it all. They understand they’re carrying something that can never be spoken out loud.
Coben summed it up simply, and chillingly. “You can live with secrets, because we all do. None of us fully knows the interior of another person.”
And that’s why Run Away ends the way it does. The cult may be gone, but the damage it caused hasn’t disappeared. It’s just moved inside a family that looks, from the outside, completely normal.
Life goes on. But nothing is ever quite the same.
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