Ron Howard loves a fact-based story and in Eden he delivers a punchy one about romantic and naive people getting a rude awakening – the natural state of humanity isn’t bliss but blood.
After recent films about Pavarotti, JD Vance and Jim Henson, Howard turns to the far less famous Margret Wittmer, who along with her husband Heinz and son Harry decamped to a remote island idyll in the Galapagos in the 1930s. There, inspired by the example of atheist intellectual vegans Friedrich Ritter and partner Dore Strauch, the Wittmers hoped to build a new life alongside them, and possibly chart a new course for humanity while doing so.
It all went badly horribly wrong, in the most exotic and beautiful setting, as if William Golding’s Lord of the Flies had been used as a template, though Wittmer got there first and her story was fact not fiction. It’s not the mosquitoes, back-breaking work or shortages of food and water that did it, but petty jealousies and power struggles, especially once Ritter and Strauch and the Wittmers had been joined on the island by the Baroness Wehrborn de Wagner-Bousquet, a sexy, footloose opportunist of dubious provenance.
This is a great story and a great cast given the Howard “safe pair of hands” treatment. Jude Law as the patrician aesthete Friedrich, Vanessa Kirby as his stern but libidinous partner – “Shall we fuck,” she asks Friedrich at one point – a woman with multiple sclerosis hoping the island will act as a nature cure. Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney as the more bourgeois Wittmers, making a go of it with middle-class seriousness and hard work. Ana de Armas as the baroness, the character with the largest personality.
With plans to develop the island for tourism, the baroness arrives on the island with a small retinue of men, there to fulfil her every desire. She is the story’s catalyst, stirring things up and propelling the drama out of the uneasy and towards the unpleasant. Armas plays her as a sexy pantomime villain, adding colour to the more restrained performances of Law and Kirby, Brühl and Sweeney.
Sweeney is perhaps the surprise. She’s too starry for the role. No argument with her playing of the compliant second wife of the older, wiser Heinz. See it as part of her ongoing Oscar campaign to appear in message movies with thoughtful themes – how long now? That said, Margret is the only character who learns anything from the nonsense going on around her and by the end has absorbed cynicism and opportunism from the baroness, and aloof disengagement from Friedrich and Dore.
Everything about this film is great – it’s luxurious looking, finely acted and the story is a knuckle-chewer full of incident. There’s a highly dramatic scene where Margret goes into labour while wild dogs snarl around her. And yet, for the most part, in spite of Jude Law regularly taking his clothes off, it remains a touch decorous.
Partly that’s the disjunction between eras. When Golding wrote his story in the mid 1950s, notions about human perfectibility and the blissful state of nature were dominant. Golding wanted to add a corrective, or even rubbish the whole romantic idea. Lord of the Flies was a cultural bucket of cold water. Whereas in the 21st century we’re far less sure about all that, and a story about silly sausages play-acting as prelapsarians comes frontloaded – there can be no shock dénouement.
Or maybe Howard’s direction and the “one thing after another” plotting is to blame. Either way, this is entertaining enough, thought-provoking enough and effective enough to hit the spot without ever really setting the screen on fire.
Eden – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
