Eden review – Ron Howard’s nasty, starry survival thriller falls over the edge

The films of Ron Howard – usually polite, Oscar-aiming true stories such as A Beautiful Mind or Apollo 13 or solidly made, anonymous IP blockbusters such as The Grinch or The Da Vinci Code – have not shown the director to be someone greatly interested in exploring or even showing much awareness of real, down-to-the-core darkness. His All-American persona, as a well-meaning aw shucks nice guy (who now claims shock upon hearing the subject of his 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy might actually not be such an inspiring figure after all) would not make him seem like the perfect match for a nasty and violent tale of the horrors we’re willing to inflict upon each other to get what we want.

For a while, taking charge of fact-based 1930s-set survival thriller Eden, he almost convinces us that maybe he’s the madman for the job, tightly steering us through a fun, frightening descent into hell. But the more his characters engage in very bad things, the more it becomes clear that perhaps Howard was indeed a very bad fit, the film drowning in the deep end.

Introducing the world premiere at this year’s Toronto film festival, Howard said he had been inspired to tell this story for years ever since he learned of it while on a family holiday in the Galapagos Islands. He recruited screenwriter Noah Pink, whose work on last year’s Tetris gave him some experience on writing greedy parties all fighting over the same thing, only this time it was over a bounty far greater. Back in the 20s, as Germany was falling into fascism, ambitious doctor Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) found solitude on the uninhabited island of Floreana. Ritter had ideas of starting a new way of thinking and living, shunning religion and traditional family values, and his writing made its way, via mail, to the mainland, showing up in newspapers and forward-thinking salons in Europe.

They’re joined by a German couple (Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney) along with their son from his former marriage, hoping the island might help cure him of his tuberculosis (Dore is also convinced by her husband that her MS will go away after more time there). It’s a frosty welcome along with a rude awakening of the grim realities of island life but things get even grimmer when another party joins them, led by the vivacious and theatrical Baroness Eloise (Ana de Armas), with her three man-servants and her sights set on building an extravagant hotel on the island.

It’s an Agatha Christie-like assemblage of unlikely characters, tension on a teetering edge as they try to find a way to live out their competing visions of what Floreana should be. Ritter and Strauch are enjoyably mean and unwelcome, following Nietzsche’s belief that escaping thy neighbour is far more preferable to loving them, and finding sexual arousal in the suffering of the more conventionally natured Germans. But the simmer, as each party works out the limitations of the other while clashing over their belief systems, is far more fun then the boil. It’s all quickly ruined by the comically awful Eloise who escalates the story from a whisper to a scream, her actions so instantly and obviously evil that she feels more like an animated Disney villain come to life.

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It doesn’t help that de Armas isn’t really equipped to vamp and camp it up to such a lofty level and Pink lumps her with dialogue that too often goes straight for the jugular when something more subtly, smartly horrible would do. There’s alternately a weird waste of Kirby, a stronger actor far better at delivering arch, bitchy one-liners, who we don’t see enough of as things slide from bad to worse. The disintegration of the reluctant community plays out like a particularly gnarly episode of Survivor as food becomes scarce and mistrust grows but the intricacies of the downfall dissolve into repetitive and obvious reversals with an exhausting finale of backstab upon backstab upon backstab.

Our attention is still secured by some of the performances – a fully naked and fully toothless Law and an underused yet alluring Kirby are magnetic throughout – and their bizarre, shaky accents and also by our desire to see just how far Howard will go with the material. At points, he goes further than we might expect with some moments of wince-inducing violence (no spoilers, but scenes involving a placenta, an infected tooth and a side-stab all provoked loud reactions at the premiere), but it’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not. There’s a fascinating coda as it fades to black, filling us in on what happened to those who made it, but by then, the ship has already capsized. Like many of his characters, Howard’s journey to the dark side has made for a brave yet failed expedition.

• Eden is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution