Oh, Ron Howard, that most tepid of Hollywood craftspeople, squinting into the Galápagos sun and discovering—at last!—his inner savage. “Eden” wants to flay you alive with the spectacle of decaying Europeans, squabbling, rutting, and violently shedding the last rags of civilization, and surprise of surprises: it bloody well does. Not because Howard uncorks some hidden visionary genius, but because he finally let himself wallow—gleefully—in the mud and blood.
The premise is as old as Genesis (or at least as old as mid-tier Discovery Channel): Westerners, convinced that the modern world has corrupted their souls, pack up their bourgeois baggage and their brittle ideals and maroon themselves on an island—remote enough to ensure that the echoes of café society will never reach their compost toilet. Of course, they all go feral. Of course, they descend into lust, heartbreak, and murder. “Cast Away,” this is not. Tom Hanks never clamped his rotting teeth onto a lover’s thigh while a Baroness cackled nearby.
If there’s a reason why “Eden” sinks its fangs where other survival yarns just gum despondently at your ankle, it’s the riotous grotesquerie on parade. Ana de Armas is the show’s wild-eyed ringmaster, howling in the ruins of her own vanity. With a German accent so ravaged it seems to spread trench foot, she presents us with a “baroness” who delivers monologues with the pheromonal arrogance of a dictator and lives in a perpetual state of sexual coup. This is not your mother’s noblewoman—though you sense she might have slept with your father, if only to prove a point about the futility of marriage.
Vanessa Kirby, meanwhile, has scoured away every last trace of sympathy and, God forbid, Instagram glamour. Toothless—literally ripping the infected things from her mouth by hand—she makes a heroine not from suffering nobly but from surviving grimly, equal parts animal rage and existential fatigue. It’s Fischer-Dieskau in a haybale: pathos curdling into black comedy and back again. Sweeney does the only honest thing left for an American expat—she braces herself with stoicism and lets Howard pile on the indignities, culminating in the kind of birth sequence that would have had Bunuel, not just Ron, rubbing his hands.
And then there’s Jude Law, stripped (in every sense), prancing about with what must be a prosthetic penis, though one can never be sure, gnawing at the carcass of philosophical seriousness until only rotted aphorisms remain. I can't say the sight was edifying, but I would hesitate to call it gratuitous—Howard needs us to see there’s nothing left to hide.
The plot is less a spiral than a series of detonations. The dialog ricochets (often desperately) between the bombastic and the profane, and if you wince at the sheer tonnage of mismatched German accents—the sort you usually hear from Franz Liebkind impersonators in community-theater revivals—well, try to enjoy the sport of it. Only Sweeney threads the Teutonic needle, suggesting, perhaps, that the history of human cruelty can best be told by way of a decent dialect coach.
There is no love lost between characters: the moment Ana de Armas strides into frame, scenery is devoured, and soon enough it’s the people devouring each other. This is not a “difficult” watch because of its violence, but because Howard—capitalizing on his most perverse instincts—finds that people are most compelling when they become unrecognizable, monstrous, and yet somehow familiar. The Eden of this film is no paradise lost but a scab you can’t stop picking.
But here’s what “Eden” accomplishes—and I say this with a mouthful of grit and no small embarrassment at how it works on me—that so many alleged “prestige” survival spectacles fudge or prettify: it makes you feel it. Not the CGI hypothermia of so many man-versus-wild amusements, but the animal panic of knowing the jungle is alive and it wants you dead. When these settlers bicker about crops or teeth or whose turn it is to boil the sea-turtle stew, it isn’t just scriptwriter’s bluster—it’s the sticky, real pain of people whose ideals have sprouted into rot. The movie’s emotional charge isn’t theoretical; it’s lived, knotted, excruciating—the misery of building something from dirt and hope and watching it all curdle the moment appetite or avarice or horniness gets the better of reason.
If I let myself be swept up (and I did, perhaps more than Howard deserves), it’s not because the premise is novel—nothing is less original than human beings betraying one another under the grinning sun—but because the mood of claustrophobic decency curdling into malice is so believable, so hard-won. You don’t root for any of these people; you recognize, uneasily, parts of yourself among them. You peer, through the weeds, at the endless rehearsal of greed, political bad faith, and that most reliable of European exports: the quick, convenient betrayal.
All credit to the women: the men, toothless or not, are shunted along like stupid cattle. There is a kind of tribute to the matriarchal spirit in the way Sweeney, Kirby, and de Armas lay waste to every Victorian ideal and soft-porn fantasy in sight. “Eden” is viciously camp, but never clueless; these actresses know they’re juggling torch and gasoline, and the pyrotechnics are much too exhilarating to resist.
There are criticisms, of course. The structure wobbles—the first act lurches while Howard reacquaints himself with contempt (a rarity for this director), and some supporting performances are squashed flat as driftwood. Kirby’s Dore is written as a vessel for plot expediency—introduce disease, subtract teeth, repeat—while Law’s philosopher is too underfed (both literally and spiritually) to anchor all that sun-dappled decay. But when Sweeney’s Margret takes over, her flickering stoicism steadies the ship, and we care, despite ourselves, whether she’ll be swallowed by the jungle or simply disemboweled by the writers.
Some will dismiss “Eden” as sensation masquerading as seriousness, the sort of button-pushing based-on-true-events that flourishes in festival lineups (and, after, on streaming platforms with a trigger warning and a glum press tour). But isn’t that the whole point? This is a movie that exists to be told in conflicting memoirs, gnawed over by gossips, misremembered by descendants. Howard, who’s spent a career offering wholesome nostrums, has finally made the anti-feel-good film, and the result is not apology but ambivalence: we’re not meant to approve or even be moved. We’re meant to watch with a mixture of horror and glee as the illusion of civilization is stripped bare. It’s thrilling, it's perverse, and—if we’re being honest—it’s more “very good” than Howard probably has any right to manage.
The popcorn of art-house survival sagas, soaked in grease and a little blood, served up by three women who could eat you alive but will probably just smoke your last cigarette and laugh at the size of your machete.
