Don’t be fooled by the title: Eden, a film that has nothing paradisiacal about it, is released in cinemas today. The thriller, directed by Ron Howard, is about bare survival.
While the third season of The White Lotus is drawing to a close on television, the big screen is heralding the next dream vacation that ends in disaster. Eden takes us to Floreana Island, located off the west coast of South America and part of the Galápagos archipelago. Here you can escape society and its problems and create a new world – far from it.
The film, directed by Ron Howard, begins with reports from a utopia. However, it quickly becomes clear that not everything is rosy in the supposed paradise. Rather, gray clouds are gathering and darkening the sky. Shadows spread and reveal the characters’ corroded souls. Eden is by far the darkest work in Howard’s filmography, which consists mainly of comfort blockbusters.
After The White Lotus, Eden is a survival thriller that turns paradise into hell
In 1929, German doctor Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his partner Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) leave their homeland behind to start a new life on Floreana. While Strauch, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, hopes that her illness will be cured, Ritter wants to write a philosophical manifesto and reports on his pioneering work in letters that are enthusiastically read in Europe.
The war veteran Heinz (Daniel Brühl) is particularly impressed by the written reports. Three years later, he sets out for Floreana with his wife Maragret (Sydney Sweeney) and his son Harry (Jonathan Tittel), who is suffering from tuberculosis. Shortly thereafter, the self-proclaimed Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet (Ana de Armas) turns up with her two lovers.
There is no sign of a luxury resort here, but Eden soon strikes a chord similar to The White Lotus: against a dreamlike backdrop, there is a seething tension deep inside the characters, making you wait for the situation to escalate. And it does – violently. Because Eden is based on a true story that ends with several deaths. But how did it come to this?
With Eden, Ron Howard unleashes his secret Werner Herzog and looks straight into the abyss
You won’t find the conciliatory filmmaker Ron Howard in Eden, who stages Robert Langdon’s scavenger hunts and accompanies three astronauts on their arduous journey home. From the outset, it is clear that no one will be happy on these sandy shores. The deceptive first impression is revealed as a ruthless natural environment that is anything but benevolent towards the settlers.
Before tempers flare, bodies and minds are put to the test by the environment. At times, it seems as if Howard is looking in the direction of Werner Herzog, who is fascinated by few things as much as the powerlessness of humans in the face of the wilderness. “There is no harmony in the universe,” Herzog explains in The Weight of Dreams. Eden delivers on this promise for 129 minutes.
Every attempt to create a new world on Floreana seems doomed to failure. Especially when people turn against each other. Partly because they are broken. Partly because they don’t trust each other. Or in the case of the Baroness: because she has no sense of anything. A circumstance that Ana de Armas takes as an opportunity to deliver one of her most insane performances to date.
Ana de Armas takes no prisoners in Eden: her Baroness destroys the island single-handedly
Remember when de Armas knocked on Keanu Reeves’ front door on Knock Knock and gave him the nightmare of his life? She’s doing the same to Jude Law, whose eyes collect more hatred with every person who sets up camp on his island. Floreana is transformed into a boiling cauldron in which five Hollywood stars come to blows in a confined space.
While de Armas gleefully lets paradise go up in flames, Law’s facial features stiffen until the beast inside him escapes and even messes with Vanessa Kirby’s determined harshness. Daniel Brühl tries to combine the naivety and creativity of his character, but at some point, nerves are frayed here as well, before Sydney Sweeney emerges as the (ice-cold) heart of the film.
Even in the devastating struggle for survival in In the Heart of the Sea, Howard was able to find more glimmers of hope than in this bitter, scheming hustle and bustle between seductive and destructive gazes. What begins as an escape from civilization mutates into an uncomfortable psychological thriller in gloomy colors that make Floreana seem like the bleakest, most hostile place on earth. Welcome to the abyss.
