Directed by: Ron Howard
Distributed by: Vertical
Written by Taylor Baker
68/100
There’s something about “Eden” that is reminiscent of an older era of Hollywood we’ve left behind. Ron Howard simultaneously uses classical framing, conventional exteriors, established rules—and adds a layer of claustrophobia. “Eden” depicts a way of life that is anything but the biblical paradise one might envision at a glance. Jude Law’s Ritter and Daniel Brühl’s Heinz operate in a familiar push and pull, with the more interesting wrinkles and complexity coming from Ana de Armas’ Baroness, Vanessa Kirby’s Dore, and Sydney Sweeney’s Margret.
What is most exciting is the layering of tension by Howard. There’s something invigorating about watching this filmmaker who’s won Oscars and made all sorts of dramatic conventional films turn in an otherwise orthodox drama that is dripping with tension and a bit eccentric in the midst of being extremely typified. Those exterior compositions showing Sweeney and Brühl’s homestead that they’ve carved out of the top of the mountain on this island against the camp of de Armas’s group as they journey up from the beach, digging into their water supply, rummaging through their home and stealing their food stores while leaving Sweeney to struggle in delivering her baby. It’s a neighbor-against-neighbor, best-of-humanity, worst-of-humanity story in a very simplistic way that Howard shoots like a filmmaker who has this story burning within him.
He seems like a rejuvenated filmmaker, channeling an excitement I haven’t seen from him outside of “Rush” in the last thirty years. Thrilled with the narrative that he gets to make, with a talented trio of actresses, adapting material that is unfriendly to the audience. That it has had such difficulty landing distribution and finding a distribution window after a little bit of buzz during its development cycle is no surprise; it’s a hard-to-pigeonhole film that is actively abrasive to the typical period-piece demographic marketers might cater to.
The way that he layers the female characters against each other through their male interlocutors, Jude Law and Daniel Brühl, is equally interesting. One of his greatest achievements in the film is having this part of the island—not the island itself, but this part of it—come to life: to feel the wild dogs, this wild boar as part of the fabric of the island, to feel this wild cow that Brühl herds up into his homestead and locks in with the loose branches as part of the island. Howard has delivered controlled discomfort, deliberately unfriendly while exact.
“Eden” Trailer
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