Eden (2024)

Ron Howard has a bit of a sideline in dramatising material that has been/could be done as a documentary.

Watching this one is left with the impression that this, however, is precisely the sort of story that needed to be taken up by a European writer or director with a genuinely nasty streak (or the rare American equivalent, such as novelist Paul Bowles.)

Or maybe even someone prepared to do more than half-heartedly hint at the comedy/spoof potential, which is precisely what Howard is doing.

Ana de Armas is constantly twirling around the edge of 'Allo 'Allo! and Jude Law goes full Jack Torrance at one stage when simply banging on his typewriter keys and namedropping Nietzsche and Schopenhauer seems not quite enough.

The premise here is what happens when you decide to live by a set of elevated ideas — in one of those archetypally unforgiving environments — and then a bunch of people with alternative worldviews, capabilities and projects move in next door: Utopia plus neighbours.

Plus some of the worst German accents ever committed to celluloid. Even the actual Germans in the cast are not beyond censure in this respect.

I have to admit I have never really quite understood the appeal of Sydney Sweeney, but hers is the stand-out performance in this film, and arguably this is, after all, her character's story, so it seems a shame that she appears below all her co-stars in the final credits.

Ron Howard has insisted that he was not so much inspired by the 2013 documentary — The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden — as by a family holiday to the islands. This made me recall the remarks of an acquaintance who picked this same archipelago for his honeymoon and found that the Galapagos were not quite the forever sunny tropical paradise that he and his wife had anticipated.