Over the past 30 years of Ron Howard’s mostly-post-comedy directorial career, some of his best movies resemble grand adventures gone wrong. Apollo 13 is filled with wonder and reverence for slipping the surly bonds of Earth until a technical malfunction redirects that awe toward a procedural rescue. The Missing is a wide-open-spaces Western mission underpinned by a dark, dangerous urgency. In The Heart Of The Sea quickly turns seafaring confidence into a harrowing survival story. Eden has survival elements, too, as well as a Western-adjacent unexplored frontier, but they’re not the product of desperation. It’s idealism that fuels a plan to relocate to the otherwise uninhabited island of Floreana, in the Galapagos, escaping the corrupted society of 1929 Germany and, indeed, mankind in general.
This plan is the brainchild of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dora Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who spend a full year off-screen building up a modest island farmhouse for themselves and no one else. Settling into their new Eden, they rig up a modest freshwater source (the island has no lakes or rivers), farm vegetables for food, tend to their animals (for companionship, not for food), treat Dora’s multiple sclerosis through nontraditional methods, and live in enough seclusion for Ritter to work—endlessly, it seems—on a world-changing manuscript. The result, Dora clarifies, will not be a mere book, any more than the Holy Bible is a book.
Dora issues that clarification to the couple’s unwanted new neighbors. Heinz (Daniel Brühl) and Margret Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney) arrive with Heinz’s son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) from a previous marriage. That they are also fleeing Germany creates no particular kinship with Ritter, who seems like the sort of man who takes grim pleasure in delivering bad news. He’s certain that this hard-working, seemingly good-natured family won’t survive in his private paradise, and hopes to do his best to hasten their departure. Instead, like a sitcom dad fruitlessly trying to enjoy his quiet time, he’s met with further meddlesome neighbors: Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) arrives with a pair of assistants, a load of clothing and supplies, and plans to build the world’s most exclusive hotel—for millionaires only.
Eden is based on a true story—on the experiences of “those who survived,” ominous introductory text notes. If it weren’t already inherently interestingly strange material, the actors would make it so, especially the women; Kirby, de Armas, and Sweeney are all movie fixtures, yet they feel like they exist in different galaxies from each other, a disjunction that the movie takes advantage of, whether intentionally or not. Sweeney reads the most like an Old West pioneer, looking stricken from the moment she appears, before she even lands on Floreana. Kirby, the most underserved of the trio, hints at perversities beneath her more obvious resentments. And Ana de Armas swans around with an intentionally hard-to-place accent, projecting glamour and helping herself to any manipulations that come along with it.
She’s also the only one on the island who seems to be consistently having fun, though Margret and Heinz must have at least a little, off-screen, as Margret quickly ends up pregnant. Howard isn’t known for making movies about sexual liberation (Did anything in the 30 years between Splash and Rush include actual nudity?) and while that’s not exactly what Eden is about, it does have an earthy, humid mood of half-decayed desire that sets it apart from his other films. The screenplay, by Noah Pink, doesn’t leave much unsaid. An implication will often be followed, a scene or two later, by a character stating it outright. But between Kirby’s eyes, de Armas’s malevolent flouncing, and Law’s toothless grimace, the physicality of the actors finds some quiet nuances in the hell-is-other-people collapse of a society that Ritter seeks to avoid.
It’s not all quiet nuance, though; there’s still room for a scene where Margret gives birth alone, standing up, as a pack of wild dogs growls and howls at her door. Howard doesn’t leap into full fever-dream mode, but he’s willing to try. His recent career has included a surprising degree of experimentation in his choice of cinematographers: He’s made multiple movies with the boldly digital-forward Anthony Dod Mantle, in addition to working with Maryse Alberti (who also shot Creed), Bradford Young (Arrival), and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Challengers). For Eden, he’s working with DP Mathias Herndl on his first big-scale movie. (Like Mukdeeprom and Alberti, Herndl has an M. Night Shyamalan connection; he shot and directed episodes of Wayward Pines.) There are moments where it’s easy to yearn for Mantle; the mixture of sun, sea, sweat, and grime seems perfect for his distorted go-anywhere close-ups. But Herndl opts for a more restrained faded-postcard look that’s less immediately eye-catching but has a subtly apocalyptic vibe, as if the characters are caught between the end and the beginning.
Smart odds are on the end, and Eden remains gripping, even improbably fun, as it captures the shifts in power and health among its principle players as they squabble over a beautiful yet not particularly hospitable environment. (If anything, the characters seem like they should be even pettier.) Thematically, the film makes an oddly compelling companion piece to Hillbilly Elegy—Howard’s nadir, of all things. The German characters are fleeing both economic collapse and rising fascism, which is to say both the subject and the result of J.D. Vance’s sham bestseller. Eden winds up yoking Howard’s more domesticated movies with his thwarted-adventure narratives. The suspense lies in whether certain characters will figure out whether they’re on a bold, one-off exploration or the cusp of a sustainable new life—and whether humanity on the whole is any good at telling them apart.
Director: Ron Howard
Writer: Noah Pink
Starring: Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas, Daniel Brühl
Release Date: August 22, 2025
