There are a lot of words you could use to describe Ron Howard as a director: steady, good with actors, journeyman, etc. But “weird” is not one of them. However, six decades into his second career as a filmmaker, it sounds like Howard has finally let his freak flag fly with Eden.
The survival thriller stars Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby as Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Dora Strauch, a married couple in the 1920s who escape to a quiet life on the island of Floreana in the Galápagos. But their peaceful oasis is interrupted by the arrival of a very pregnant Margaret (Sydney Sweeney) and her husband Heinz (Daniel Brühl), and later, Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) and her two “crazy threesome” male companions (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace). Will they be able to co-exist on the island together?
We’ll have to wait until Eden is released to find out, but the film had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, and the reviews are all over the place. One critic praised Howard for allowing himself “to lose his mind,” while another called Eden “a movie that makes you want to get off that island and go back to a place where the people are sane.” The closest thing to a consensus among reviewers is that Sweeney gives the best performance.
Below, you’ll find what critics are saying about Eden.
Chase Hutchinson for The Wrap:
Though built around an excellent ensemble cast of Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, and Ana de Armas, it’s Sydney Sweeney who runs away with the whole thing. She doesn’t always give the loudest performance of the bunch, though it’s her subtle looks and a growing agency that turns Eden into something more. Also, if you thought you would never again see a movie where Sweeney plays a character going through the most hellish pregnancy imaginable after this year’s magnificent horror Immaculate, think again. This and every moment with her at the forefront is Eden at its best.
Owen Gleiberman for Variety:
Eden, which is based on events that unfolded 100 years ago on one of the Galápagós Islands, is a difficult movie to characterize. It’s been labeled as a “thriller,” but I would describe it as a misanthropic survivalist Robinson Crusoe meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with deranged footnotes by Friedrich Nietzsche. For Howard, the film sure is different (it has sex, murder, and animal slaughter). Yet there’s another word for it — the word is terrible.
Ross Bonaime for Collider:
But for as much fun as Eden does eventually become, it’s still a mostly uneven thriller that doesn’t really take off until it embraces its darkness. While Eden seems to be attempting a story that shows normal people (well, 1920s Germans who decided to live on a desert island) fighting against fascism after running away from the world, that mostly gets lost to dive into the more base desires of these characters.
Benjamin Lee for The Guardian:
Our attention is still secured by some of the performances – a fully naked and fully toothless Law and an underused yet alluring Kirby are magnetic throughout – and their bizarre, shaky accents and also by our desire to see just how far Howard will go with the material. At points, he goes further than we might expect with some moments of wince-inducing violence (no spoilers, but scenes involving a placenta, an infected tooth and a side-stab all provoked loud reactions at the premiere), but it’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.
Kate Erbland for IndieWire:
But what we do get from Howard’s latest is a strong reminder of his handle on not just craft and casting, but also story and tone. No film about the utter demise of a supposed utopia — a real one, to boot! — and the utter infallibility of human beings should be this fun, but we’re lucky this one is. It helps the hard truths go down easier, especially about who we all are as people (you know, hellish).
Bilge Ebiri for Vulture:
Margret is young and impressionable (Dore calls her “a child bride” at first, erroneously) but she’s also pregnant, and watching her raw, snarling instincts start to take over the course of the film is one of Eden’s great pleasures. Sweeney, who was already put through the tortures of the damned in Immaculate earlier this year, again gets to play an innocent who discovers inner, almost mythical reserves of survival. She gets the film’s most gruesome, most intense set piece, about which the less said right now, the better.
Eden does not have a release date yet.
