TORONTO, Canada—Company breeds misery in Eden, Ron Howard’s based-on-real-events thriller about a group of disparate souls whose quest for freedom, rebirth, and redemption is stymied by their base instincts and proximity to each other.
Based on the conflicting reports of those who survived this astonishing saga, the director’s grungy, edgy affair—premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival—is part biblical cautionary tale, part Lord of the Flies nightmare. Never dull if also only intermittently surprising, it’s another of the director’s sturdy star-studded genre efforts.
In the winter of 1932, Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney), and his son from a first marriage, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), arrive on the Galapagos isle of Floreana. There, they intend to live alongside, and by the teachings of, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore (Vanessa Kirby), who relocated to this inhospitable rock in the middle of the ocean as a rejection of their native Germany and its increasingly fascist society.
Back home, Friedrich has become a media sensation due to the daring path he’s set before himself, all of it driven by his toil on a manifesto that expresses his philosophy for a new world order. Friedrich believes that the meaning of life is pain, because, “In pain, we find truth. And in truth, salvation.” He and Dore practice what they preach, with Friedrich having pulled out all his teeth to avoid infection and Dore struggling with multiple sclerosis.
Ron Howard on the set of Eden
Jasin Boland/Courtesy of TIFFFriedrich and Dore have settled on Floreana to figure out how to remake civilization, and they don’t take kindly to Heinz and his clan, who they send to live in barren hillside caves located beside one of two pitiful water sources. Though they assume that this will make quick work of the interlopers, it doesn’t, since Heinz is an industrious true-believer who puts his mind to transforming the landscape and, with it, his fortunes.
Margret is initially aghast at her new reality. With few options, however, she commits to helping her husband haul supplies, build their domicile, and tend to their garden. Against all odds—including packs of wild dogs that decimate their canned food supplies—they’re soon living relatively comfortably, complete with edible crops and a corralled cow that produces milk.
“What were you expecting—paradise?” jokes the ship captain who drops them on Floreana’s beach, but Heinz and Margret tame their environs better than anyone could have imagined. This is largely without the help of Friedrich, who’s growing envious of their successes. Before Fridrich and Heinz can develop anything resembling an actual rivalry, more serious trouble appears in the person of Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), who claims the title “Baroness” and makes her grand entrance on the shoulders of her lovestruck engineer (Felix Kammerer) and hunky bodyguard (Toby Wallace) like she’s Cleopatra reincarnated.
Frolicking in the water with her two boy toys, thereby stoking one of their resentment, Eloise wants to build a grand hotel on the beach that she’s going to call “Hacienda Paradiso.” Assuming that the island’s current residents will be a thorn in her side, she begins pitting Friedrich and Heinz against one another.
Eloise is the serpent in Eden’s figurative garden, and her conduct is the catalyst for the calamity to follow. Heedlessly running through her canned stockpiles, she has her underlings ransack Heinz’s home at the exact moment that his wife, alone and pregnant, goes into labor. Margret’s delivery while being menaced by wild dogs, culminating with her growling with animalistic ferocity at her canine attackers, is equal parts harrowing and goofy. It’s the finest sequence in the film, largely because it feels so unhinged and primal.
Yet despite its over-the-topness, Howard prevents his material from devolving into silliness. De Armas is deliberately campy as dragon lady con artist Eloise, wielding her sexuality as both a lure and a weapon. Her flamboyant sexiness provides the proceedings with a requisite spark, and clashes well with Friedrich’s fanatically punishing lifestyle and Heinz and Margret’s stern assiduousness.
Sweeney’s Margret is this story’s nominal protagonist, but the actress is never wholly convincing as a dowdy and earnest young mother; no matter her modest dress and speech, her eyes have a fieriness that’s only fitting at story’s end.
Law and Kirby, on the contrary, exude a zealotry and bitterness—toward their neighbors and each other—that’s suitably grimy and jagged. Their dynamic grows more charged as rations start running perilously low and Eloise orchestrates underhanded schemes to sow seeds of dissention. By the time Friedrich is madly banging away at the same typewriter key, like some shirtless island variation on Jack Nicholson’s The Shining paterfamilias, doom has become an inevitability for at least some of these foolhardy folks.
Howard gradually builds menace through sideways glances, cutting remarks, testy confrontations, and snapshots of hawks catching prey in their talons and crabs crawling over skeletons. Mathias Herndl’s sunburnt cinematography paints Floreana as an outpost of harsh sand, sharp rock, and tough soil, its desolation at once breathtaking and intimidating.
Eden doesn’t strain its Old Testament undercurrents, and it wisely spreads its condemnation around. The film is, at heart, a portrait of the invariable schisms that come from asking strangers to coexist, and in that regard, it’s a scathing indictment of Friedrich’s ideas, which are eventually revealed to be sub-Nietzschean notions that are predicated on (and justified by) the unnecessary mess he’s made for himself and his compatriots.
Eden is too unadventurous to drum up much suspense, and it never wholly resolves the tension between its characters’ daft choices and its conclusion’s quasi-celebration of Margret. Nonetheless, its straightforward approach—replete with convincing production and set design—keeps it consistently compelling.
It’s also the beneficiary of Law and de Armas’ considerable star power, he tapping into Friedrich’s fervor and the charisma that makes his ambitious plans so alluring, and she a hurricane of sex, cunning, and shady villainy. Thanks to them, the film proves an engrossing story of individual dreams and manias, communal frictions and failings, and the fact that sometimes, Hell really is other people.
