Separate groups of people leave the world behind, settle on a remote island, but turn against each other.
Brutality with a purpose. Eden is not interested in comforting its audience, but in projecting humanity’s oldest fantasy – starting over – and its most consistent failure: destroying every so-called paradise we touch. Co-writer/director Ron Howard strips survival down to its rawest question: when everything is taken away, what remains of our morals – if they were ever truly there to begin with?
Set against the aftermath of world-scale death and collapse (WWI), Eden follows people who flee civilisation not to build something better, but to escape what they have seen humanity become. An island promises rebirth. Clean air. Clean conscience. Yet the film never pretends that geography can cleanse psychology. Hunger, fear, vanity, and ideological rigidity creep in quietly, then take over completely. Will corruption return, or has it actually never left?
The script is tight, the characters clearly defined, and the pacing deliberate without ever feeling indulgent. Every moral position feels provisional, every belief fragile. Nihilistic philosophies collide with hollow hope, and ideals that once sounded noble collapse the moment survival demands compromise. Do principles survive starvation? Does community exist without advantage? Is cruelty a failure of humanity – or its most honest expression?
Cinematically, Eden never overreaches. Performances are grounded, stripped of theatricality, allowing the brutality to feel lived-in rather than staged. Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Sydney Sweeney, and the rest of the cast are excellent choices. Twists arrive not as shock tactics, but as inevitable consequences of earlier choices. The suspense doesn’t come from what will happen, but from who will break first – and how far they’ll fall once they do. The soundtrack subtly accompanies the dark emotions and feelings, which are more often than not projected onto the weather (pathetic fallacy). The ending pulls the audience forward not through spectacle, but through dread rooted in recognition.
And yet, despite its superb cast, everyone’s efforts, and that it’s based on an actual, intriguing, fascinating, and breathtaking story, Eden largely disappeared upon release – financially and critically – not because it failed, but because it demanded attention rather than offering escapism. It asks viewers to pay for discomfort, for a disturbance that feels uncomfortably familiar rather than sensationally new. In an industry addicted to immediacy and noise, subtle existential horror is easy to overlook.
Eden may not offer hope, but it offers clarity, which can be far more unsettling.
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