Review: Eden — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Eden

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

Stars: Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney

Writers: Noah Pink, Ron Howard

Director: Ron Howard

 

A masterfully paced, exquisitely filmed true story of deadly obsession in Utopia’s underbelly, director Ron Howard’s cautionary drama throbs with passions both carnal and cranial; a gritty reminder that idealistic notions too soon taken to their extremes can have mind-bogglingly bad consequences.

All German physician Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) wants is to be left alone. So alone, in fact, that he and wife Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) have abandoned post-World War I Europe and retreated to an otherwise uninhabited Galapagos Island. There, Ritter spends his days in the couple’s thatched hut, hunched over a typewriter, writing his seemingly endless manifesto, a blueprint for disassembling the world’s current societies and replacing them with a global paradise of equality and prosperity.

Periodically, passing ships bring supplies. They also pick up Ritter’s mail: missives on the progress of his work, addressed to the editors of the world’s leading newspapers. Unknown to Ritter, his letters have become a global sensation, inspiring intense public discussions, and leading a few brave souls to try and reach his embryonic island utopia.

First to arrive are young Heinz (Daniel Bruehl) and his wife, Margret (Sydney Sweeney), a pair of naifs who are desperate to escape the crushing economic and social pressures that plague postwar Germany. With them is their young son Harry (Jonathan Tittel), a sickly kid whose health, his parents believe, will be restored by a life building log cabins, tilling volcanic soil, and generally scratching out a rustic survival.

Much to Friedrich’s surprise — and dismay — the little family seems to thrive in their new environment, even after Margret announces she is pregnant. What’s more, Friedrich and Heinz find themselves sharing an alliance of discomfort with the arrival of another contingent led by a lavishly overdressed and ridiculously snooty woman (Ana de Armas) who insists everyone refer to her as “The Baroness.” We first see her being carried ashore on the shoulders of two assistants who, we soon learn in the loudest way imaginable, are also her lovers.

As these disparate characters arrive, viewers of a certain age will be compelled to create a mental checklist of familiar island castaways: The no-nonsense Professor, the incongruous Movie Star, the innocent Mary Ann, the clueless Gilligan. Presently, a Thurston Howell III stand-in (Richard Roxburgh) arrives with a string quartet in tow. There is even, briefly, a Skipper. Indeed, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of the 1960s TV series Gilligan’s Island, originally envisioned the show as a sitcom social experiment, stranding representatives of American culture on a desert island petri dish and seeing what would happen.

But Eden is no laugh track-fueled Three Hour Tour. With mounting dread and relentless layering of the characters’ open resentments and secret betrayals, Howard has constructed a sweaty, steamy, bloody Grand Guignol Gilligan, one that explodes with violence and rumbles with excruciating peril. (Pro Tip: If you know someone expecting a baby, do NOT ask them to sit through Eden’s harrowing childbirth scene. On the other hand, if you’re a parent looking for a way to discourage your teenage kids from having sex — perhaps forever — by all means do set up an Eden family movie night.)

To film his Paradise-Gone-to-Pot epic, Howard made the unusual choice of Mathias Herndl, known primarily for TV work. Here, Herndl creates widescreen canvases of mountainous jungle (Queensland, Australia, stands in for the Galapagos) contrasted with scenes within cramped, cluttered cabins where the claustrophobic climate of Ritter’s world seems palpable.

Law brings haughty superiority to the character of Ritter, a guy who commands unending deference to what he deems his clearly superior intellect and soaring moral correctness. In his first encounter with the Baroness, Ritter stands naked at the steps of his hut, strutting like a peacock, telegraphing his elevated sense of evolutionary development. De Armas, Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in 2023’s Blonde, offers a nonplussed response that cleverly foreshadows things we will eventually learn about the Baroness’s mystery-shrouded past.

As Ritter’s conflicted wife, Kirby (Princess Margaret on The Crown) embodies a true believer who is slowly disillusioned by her idol/hubby’s dwindling commitment to the ideals that forged their relationship. Eventually she must make a choice between declaring allegiance to the man or his ideals — but she can’t do both.

In a film that lavishes memorable story arcs on all its characters — even the more minor ones — it is the pair of Margret and Heinz who take the longest narrative journey. As Heinz, a man emotionally damaged by war yet determined to make a life with his family, Bruehl (Inglorious Basterds) morphs from a stupidly self-confident would-be gentleman farmer to a warrior who’ll even revisit his wartime nightmare if it means protecting those he loves.

If you’re reading this review, say, beyond six months after Eden’s theatrical release, you may have to strain to recall the one-week, politically-tinged controversy that surrounded Sweeney in August 2025. The episode’s proximity to Eden’s release date requires that I acknowledge it here, but please don’t wrack your brain to summon up a mindless distraction from what is one of the year’s most powerful film performances.  In Margret — a young woman crushed by European norms who eventually sees no need to perpetuate them half a world away — Sweeney has created a character we root for from the start.

So wildly outrageous are the characters and events depicted in Eden, you may want to keep reminding yourself “It’s not just a movie!” In fact, a brief online search for details of the real-life Friedrich Ritter and his wife yields the uncomfortable revelation that Howard has actually smoothed over some of the pair’s more outlandish eccentricities.

This is one island where getting voted off would be the best thing that could happen.