We like to dream about perfect places. A clean slate. A garden where everyone eats well and no one argues much and nature seems to smile at us. It is easy to imagine that place. Building it is the hard part. That is the pulse of Ron Howard’s new film Eden, which takes its story from a real attempt to start over on a rugged island in the Galapagos almost a century ago. The movie follows three separate attempts to invent a better life. They all land on the same patch of rock and scrub and salt, and that patch never bends for any of them.
There are movies that try to lay out the pieces of their story neatly. This one stacks and turns them and lets them fall into place at an increasing speed. Noah Pink, who also wrote Tetris, shapes the script as if he is arranging interlocking blocks. The angles match up only when the picture grows darker. Small objects and passing remarks from the early reels are not small at all. They return when things boil over. Chekhovs old rule about the gun that must go off finds a home here. When you see it, you know it is a promise. The film keeps that promise in a way that made me lean forward a little too far.
It starts quietly enough. A gifted German physician named Friedrich Ritter comes ashore with Dore Strauch. He is played with a steel glint by Jude Law. Vanessa Kirby gives Dore a watchful calm that hides its own storms. The pair has left the modern world on purpose. He is so determined to live without the conveniences of cities that he had all his teeth pulled before the journey. He did not want a toothache to drive them back. Metal dentures do the work now. He eats only plants. He spends his days writing a set of ideas he believes can save people from themselves. They are not there to create a village. They want to be an example others might follow somewhere else. Or maybe they just want to be left alone. He writes letters about their experiment, and those letters reach readers back home. That is the spark for the trouble that follows.
Before long, another trio arrives from Germany. Heinz Wittmer, played by Daniel Brühl with a quiet devotion, steps off the boat with his young son and his new wife, Margret. Sydney Sweeney plays Margret, and she is astonishing in the ways that do not shout. They set up a modest home of their own in a different part of the island. They build a system to collect water. They try to keep to themselves and do honest work. They are not ideologues. They want safety and a future. They pray. They hope. They do not intend to provoke anyone.
Then comes a thunderclap in the form of a woman who calls herself The Baroness. Ana de Armas explodes into the frame with bright silk, red lips, and a sense that the rules do not apply to her. She arrives carried on shoulders, with men who serve as lovers, guards, and labor. She talks about opening a grand hotel, only for the wealthy. She wants to bring civilization with her. Not the kind that plants a garden and waits for a harvest. The kind that expects a cocktail at sunset and a bath that smells like citrus. She lays out her camp as if she is the queen of a small country, and then she acts like it.
So now there are three camps. Three sets of values. Three ways of thinking about freedom and need and how to live. They do not agree on much. They do not even agree that they should try to agree. There is no meeting to set rules. No plan for how to share the few resources this place will offer. At first, they nod from a distance. They pretend it will work if they each stay in their corner and focus on their own projects. But hunger is a strong wind. It pushes people closer and closer together. Once people need things, they stop pretending they do not.
The land is not gentle. It is not the bright paradise you might see on a postcard in an airport shop. Cinematographer Mathias Herndl shows the ground as hard and the sun as unforgiving. There is beauty, yes. There is also no water where you want it and no shade when you need it. Animals come where food is planted because that is what animals do. The garden cannot keep them out forever. Fences fail. Nets tear. A hungry goat is more determined than a wooden gate is stubborn. The camera lingers on the dust and on the grit that settles into everything. This is a place that takes, and it does not apologize.
The rhythms of life grow harsher. The Wittmers work and wait and do their best to be decent. Ritter writes and lectures and tries to keep his distance while Dore tends to the things that must be done each day. The Baroness plays games with the men around her and anyone who gets near her camp. Small gestures turn into grudges. A pot of food goes missing. A tool is borrowed and not returned. A path is blocked on purpose. A lie told with a smile becomes a mess that someone else has to clean up. The movie shows how quickly the idea of mine turns into the urge to just take. There is a dinner scene where the richest food on the island appears under lantern light. It is silly and grand and also mean. In that moment a quiet voice asks for the meat that everyone suspects was taken from someone else. It is a polite line with an edge that cuts.
At the center of all this tension is a decision about force. Ritter says again and again that he did not come here to arm himself. He believes guns are a sickness brought by the old world. He wants to live apart from that. But pressure builds. A threat feels real. So he changes his mind and gets one. And once that metal weight enters the story you can feel the speed of it. Choice narrows. Moves are set in motion. Anger conducts like electricity.
A visitor breaks the spell for a moment. A man of wealth from Hollywood arrives on a scientific mission. He is played by Richard Roxburgh with a soft humor and a precise eye. He tells these pioneers, if you want to call them that, that they are a living page out of Darwin. Survival will favor the fittest. The question is what does fit mean here. Is it the strongest body. The sharpest mind. The coldest heart. On this ground fitness has a strange shape. For Margret it means bravery with no audience and no applause. There is a sequence where she gives birth without help, alone but not broken. Sweeney plays it without grand gestures. Her strength is steady and private and real. She watches. She learns. She does not make speeches about truth. She simply tells it.
The more extreme personalities in this world push the story around like heavy weather. The Baroness blows through scenes with a heat that bends others out of shape. Ritter can be rigid and proud to the point of cruelty. Dore loves him but also sees past his claims about purity. She gets tired. She gets angry. She is not a saint. The script does not always find a single tone that can hold them all together. At times the film feels like three movies that meet each other only when something breaks. You can feel that structural strain. It is not a failure exactly, but you do notice it. And then the final stretch snaps everything together with a violence that feels both inevitable and a little dizzying. Chaos. That is the word that fits. And there is pain in it.
Howard lets the sound work on you. Hans Zimmer’s score starts with a low murmur and edges into a nervous breath that becomes a long held note. It nudges you from one mood to the next. It never shouts, not at first, but it hums in the background like a warning. When the story reaches its worst conclusions the music does not cushion you. It hardens the edges. You do not get to relax.
If you have ever looked out at a perfect suburban lawn you might have felt a strange mix of relief and worry. The grass is trimmed to the exact height. The borders are clean. The weeds are gone, as if by magic. But you know that kind of order does not happen on its own. It is made by constant effort and the quiet pouring of things that come in bottles. It is a small reflection of a bigger human habit. We talk about going back to nature as if it is a simple return. As if nature is waiting for us with a soft touch. It is not. Tennyson reminded us long ago that nature has red teeth and claws. We have those too. We can pretend we do not. We can claim purity or progress. Either way we bring our hungers with us.
Eden is not just a story about people on a far away shore. It is a story about what happens whenever a few strong wills decide to build a world from scratch without a shared vision or a shared conscience. The doctor believes he can reason his way to a new humanity and forgets how much labor and kindness are required to survive a week. The family believes daily decency will be enough and it almost is, until it is not. The Baroness believes luxury and charm can bend any place to her will. She is wrong. The island does not care about any of them. It presses them all in the same way. It reveals what is underneath their talk. It shows you what they will do when a fence fails and the food is gone.
As a piece of cinema it is often beautiful without being pretty. The camera finds texture. The sound finds an ache. The director trusts silence when it matters. The performances find sharp corners. Law gives Ritter an intensity that is impressive and also hard to love. Kirby keeps Dore from becoming a sighing partner by letting us see her judgment, her humor, and her fatigue. Brühl plays Heinz as a man who resists pride. He listens first. He works. Jonathan Tittel as Harry has a few small moments that remind you that children understand more than adults think. And Sweeney as Margret is the soul that steadies the film. She never seems to force anything. She watches. She learns. She chooses. Her single most demanding scene, the one that asks her to face pain with no help, is done with such restraint that you might not breathe until it is over. Ana de Armas gives the Baroness the flash and the danger the role needs, but she also lets you see how empty the center of that blaze can be.
There are choices that may divide audiences. The refusal to tie the three camps together under one clear banner of theme can feel messy. Maybe that is the point. Utopias are tidy only on paper. Real people come with unmatching edges. The movie lets those edges scrape against each other. Sometimes the tone wobbles. A few twists in the final act arrive with such speed that it may leave you a step behind, or asking if that escalation needed one more scene to land. I kept thinking, slow down, show me one more moment of quiet. But the film is not interested in soothing you. It wants you to feel the hard push of each choice.
What lingers is the idea that we take ourselves with us. All our plans for better living are still built by the same hands that built the old ones. It is a humbling thought. It is also a warning. When someone says they will fix the world if you just give them a stretch of empty land and a few believers, you might ask who will set the rules and who will keep the fire going at night and what happens when the first storm comes. Eden is not a lecture. It is a story. But it invites those questions, and it refuses to give tidy answers.
There is also a strange tenderness in the movie. Despite the scheming and the harsh endings, there are moments where people reach across the divide. A shared bucket of water. A quiet word. A glance that admits fear. Those small gestures matter. They are the parts of us that make survival more than biology. Darwin may measure fitness by who endures. Stories measure it by who keeps a hold on their decency when they are pressed into a corner. In that measure Margret is the fittest. She does not win anything in a loud way. She simply remains herself.
By the time the credits arrive, the island has taught its lesson again. You cannot bend a place like this to your design without consequence. You cannot build a sanctuary without building a community, and you cannot build a community on the back of one persons will. Even good intentions crack when they are carried by pride. The film ends with the echo of that lesson still ringing. It is not hopeless. It is just honest.
Eden is a tough and thoughtful work. It is also surprisingly suspenseful for what could have been a slow tale of ideas in conflict. Howard directs with a sure hand, even when the material strains. The team behind the camera places you where you can feel the heat of the day and the chill when the wind comes up at night. The score pries your nerves loose then holds them there. The cast brings a strange true story to life with grace and bite.
If you go looking for a film that will tell you how to live, this is not it. If you go looking for one that will show you how hard that question is and how quickly we reveal ourselves in the absence of the comforts we take for granted, then this is worth your time. Perfect Edens are easy to conjure in the mind. Living in one is different. On Floreana as in the suburbs, in any city, on any farm, people face the same old challenge. Make a garden or keep a garden, in a world that does not care if you succeed. The movie does not give a recipe. It gives a story. Sometimes that is better. It lets us see what we might do next.
