Eden Review: Ron Howard Goes To The Dark Side In Uneven Thriller [TIFF 2024]

Ron Howard isn't someone you think of as a "dark" director. He makes middlebrow historical dramas — often sanding down their subjects' darker edges, most notably with John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind" — and Dan Brown adaptations. He can make intense films, sure, but when he's directed intense survival thrillers in the past — "Apollo 13," "Thirteen Lives" — they're ultimately about people who, well, survive.

Howard's new movie "Eden," premiering at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, comes as something of a surprise as a truly dark survival thriller where most of the characters die at each other's hands. "Here's a story from history I love" is a common enough Howard inspiration, but this particular choice of story, about a failed outpost in the uninhabited Galapagos island of Floreana in the late 1920s and early 1930s, feels more like something Martin Scorsese might tackle instead.

So how does this change of pace work out for the beloved "Arrested Development" narrator? Okay. Not great, but okay. On the plus side, "Eden" has a killer ensemble cast and several memorable scenes of full-on "WTF" madness — enough of which seem to be drawn straight from the real (if not necessarily reliable) historical accounts of this social experiment. Narratively, it's not doing anything obviously wrong, but the screenplay by Noah Pink (writer of Apple's "Tetris") also doesn't quite succeed at making something special out of the material beyond its in-the-moment thrills. And technically, many aspects of the production feel oddly underwhelming.

Ron Howard has wanted to direct this story for a while, but I wonder if part of his interest in getting it done now is out of a sense of atonement for unleashing J.D. Vance on the world with "Hillbilly Elegy." Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and Dora Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) left Germany for the Galapagos in 1929 to escape the rise of fascism. Ritter hopes to save humanity with his manifesto, but he doesn't have much love for humanity himself, preferring to live alone with his partner, who's trying to recover from multiple sclerosis. With his isolation threatened by several new arrivals inspired by his voyage — first the war vet Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Bruehl) and his wife Margaret (Sydney Sweeney), then a party led by "the Baroness" Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) seeking to build a hotel on the island — and the stress of living in an inhospitable climate, Ritter's philosophy starts to sound an awful lot like the fascists he once opposed. Parallels to the guy who compared a President to Hitler before becoming that same guy's Vice Presidential candidate?

A taste of some of the wilder things "Eden" showcases: Law bearing it all, for anyone who ever wanted to see young Dumbledore's wand. Ana de Armas just chewing the scenery and leaving no crumbs, including a hilarious attempt at a seduction scene — if her character seems too absurd to be a real person, there's a reason for that. Sweeney somehow topping her work in "Immaculate" when it comes to frightening pregnancy scenes. Lots of death scenes of varying degrees of gruesomeness; the most violent of these inspired full-on applause from the TIFF audience. 

So why didn't "Eden" make a bigger impact on me with all of its entertaining and attention-grabbing elements? I think it's a case that while the specifics of the story are fascinating, the general thrust is exceedingly familiar to anyone who's read "Heart of Darkness," "Lord of the Flies," or other similar "men turning animalistic out in the wild" narratives. It doesn't delve deep enough into any of the more distinctive themes — Dr. Ritter's philosophical ambitions could have been explored more, for instance. The narrative structure and slow pace also hold it back from being one of the more exciting or propulsive examples of this material.

Ron Howard filmed this independently, working at rapid pace. When asked after the premiere screening how long the shoot took, he joked he couldn't answer because if studios knew, they'd never give him a reasonable filming schedule ever again. On one level, that's impressive, but the rush job unfortunately shows because there's a sense of cheapness to some of the technical aspects. The cinematographer, Mathias Herndl, has only worked on TV movies and shows before this, and while Howard might want a theatrical release for "Eden" after the controversy over Amazon pushing "Thirteen Lives" to streaming, this looks like a streaming movie. The color scheme, draining the Galapagos of its greenery for dull grays, might have worked for the gritty tone they're going for if they shot on traditional film (or even filtered for an appropriate digital approximation), but the images look too weirdly crisp for that to work. The framing is pretty bland in a lot of scenes, too, with the widescreen frame rarely utilized to its full potential. The sound mix is also rough, with Jude Law's dialogue in particular often sounding fuzzy.

"Eden" will attract interest for its strong ensemble and for its intriguingly dark true story. It's an entertaining enough way to pass two hours, but it's also not a film I expect people will be thinking about long after they see it.

"Eden" premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It does not yet have American distribution.