‘Eden’ Review: Ron Howard’s Account of the Galápagos Affair Is a Ridiculous Shambles

Big personalities and bigger ambitions clash on the Galápagos isle of Floreana in Ron Howard’s Eden, resulting in a group of strangers being unable to live together in harmony. And it’s much the same case for the film, with none of its parts—not its characters, its ideas, or its accents—ever quite coalescing into a coherent whole.

Based on a true story, Eden begins on the disillusioned Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who left civilization behind to start anew on Floreana in the early 1930s. She hoped the island air would help her multiple sclerosis while he sought to cure all of mankind’s ills by using their isolation to pen a radical new philosophy. They make for an odd and intense couple, the kind who trade Nietzsche quotes as a form of foreplay.

Heinz (Daniel Brühl) and Margret Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney) soon hear about the Ritters’ exploits, finding them so inspiring that they head to Floreana along with their young son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), hoping to carve out a little slice of paradise for themselves. What they encounter instead is an island whose inhospitality is matched only by that of the Ritters.

The two couples feel drawn from entirely different films. Law and Kirby seem to be having a blast playing the Ritters, barking every line in cartoonish German accents and doing something audacious in each new scene—Friedrich swanning around naked, Dore canoodling with her beloved pet donkey, and the two of them engaging in strange, shouty sex. The Wittmers, on the other hand, are basically real people on a grim quest to survive under extremely hostile conditions. Eden’s visual style seems to lean in their direction, striking the more muted tone of a serious drama, but the next character to arrive tips the film back toward high camp.

Carried ashore on the shoulders of her strapping toyboy companions, the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) is a supposed aristocrat with delusions of grandeur and dreams of building a grand hotel. Flirting and threatening her way through every scene, the baroness is the whore to Margret’s Madonna, though both characters are written a little too one-dimensionally for this contrast to be particularly meaningful.

Relations between the islanders rapidly deteriorate as the baroness starts stealing from the others and trying to play them off one another. Her schemes aren’t especially clever, and it’s hard to see why the others put up with her antics; they seem to be cowed by the presence of her gun-toting bodyguard (Toby Wallace), despite the fact that they all own rifles of their own.

As the plot progresses, the film appears increasingly adrift, discordantly sliding between farce, satire, and murder mystery. But Eden’s odd mélange of tones also lends it an exciting unpredictability. None of the performances really go together but, taken separately, they’re all quite enjoyable, especially Law’s gonzo turn as the glowering philosopher. And while Sweeney’s accent is a little wobbly, she gives a truly hell-for-leather showing in Eden’s most viscerally memorable sequence. This is a film where you never quite know if the next scene is going to bring you a knife fight, a literary debate, or a childbirth inside a cave surrounded by wild dogs.