Eden

Hell is an Island in the Pacific

I am not entirely sure when Ron Howard decided to stop making movies about the triumph of the human spirit, but I am fascinated by the pivot. For decades, the director built a career on communal survival and fundamentally decent people doing their best under pressure—think of the boys in *Apollo 13* or the divers in *Thirteen Lives*. Still, with *Eden*, a sweat-soaked, profoundly cynical plunge into the Galapagos, Howard seems to have finally lost his faith in us. (Whether that is a symptom of his own exhaustion or just a dark detour, I cannot quite say.)

The setup is almost too cruel to be fiction, though it is entirely rooted in a bizarre 1930s historical record. Fleeing the encroaching shadow of European fascism, a disparate group of Germans pack up their lives and attempt to forge a utopian society on the uninhabited island of Floreana. They do not want to fix the world; they want to outrun it. Still, the problem with running away to a deserted island is that you still have to bring yourself along.



The first to arrive are Dr. Friedrich Ritter and his partner, Dore Strauch. Jude Law plays Ritter as an arrogant, Nietzsche-spouting tyrant of the jungle. A genuinely ugly performance. And I mean that as a compliment. Law stripped himself of his usual charm to embody this megalomaniac, even wearing a set of painful metal dentures for the shoot—the real Ritter preemptively extracted his own teeth to avoid jungle infections. You can see the discomfort in the way Law holds his jaw, a constant, tight grimace that makes every syllable he spits at Vanessa Kirby's Dore feel barbed. He does not want a paradise. He wants a kingdom where he is the only subject.

Still, then the neighbors show up. The fragile peace is shattered by the arrival of the Wittmer family, led by Daniel Brühl and an utterly stripped-down Sydney Sweeney as Margret. And just as the territorial squabbling begins to resemble a dark domestic comedy, Ana de Armas literally washes ashore as the "Baroness" Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, carried onto the sand by her two live-in lovers. De Armas is operating on a completely different frequency here. She plays the Baroness as a hyper-manipulative grifter intent on building a luxury hotel in the mud, using her sexuality with a terrifying, calculated ease. She knows exactly what effect she has on the people around her, and she wields it like a blunt instrument.



There is a specific sequence midway through the film that I haven't been able to shake. It is the moment when the island stops being a backdrop and becomes an active, hostile participant. Margret goes into labor alone in a rocky cave. She is miles from medical help, terrified, and the scent of blood draws a pack of feral dogs to the entrance. Howard shoots the scene without an ounce of his usual sentimentality. Sweeney is not given any glamorous angles; she is reduced to pure, desperate animal instinct, forcing out the baby with a scream while trying to fend off the snapping jaws just feet away. After years of the culture primarily focusing on her bombshell status in projects like *Euphoria* or *Anyone But You*, her work here is a genuine shock to the system. She is fighting for her life in the dirt, and you feel every jagged breath.

It does not all work. The script occasionally stumbles into anachronistic therapy-speak, and the pacing sags when the characters spend too much time philosophizing instead of plotting against one another. *The Guardian* noted that Howard "almost convinces us that maybe he is the madman for the job, tightly steering us through a fun, frightening descent into hell", and I think that "almost" is the operative word. Sometimes the campy soap-opera elements clash violently with the gruesome reality of their situation.



And yet, I couldn't look away. *Eden* is messy, mean-spirited, and occasionally ridiculous, but it is alive in a way that so many polished studio dramas simply are not. It strips away the romantic myth of the "return to nature" to reveal the rotting core of human ego underneath. As the bodies eventually start piling up and the survivors eye each other across the campfire, you are left with a distinctly uncomfortable realization. They didn't escape society at all. They just boiled it down to its most toxic, concentrated form.