The 1930s tropical ‘utopia’ that became a living hell

When a group of European settlers made a home on an uninhabited Galapagos island, they were hoping for paradise. But instead it turned into a nightmare – as new film Eden, starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas, recounts.

“Modern Adam and Eve in Pacific Eden”. “Mad Empress in the Garden of Eden”. “The Insatiable Baroness Who Created a Private Paradise”. These actual headlines and many more like them blared across newspapers and magazines in Europe and the US in the mid-1930s. Yet that “Private Paradise”, occupied by a handful of people on an otherwise uninhabited Galapagos island, became a site of deceit, manipulation and, ultimately, mysterious disappearances. Ron Howard’s entertaining new film, Eden, dramatises this outlandish but true story, with its colourful characters including a misanthropic doctor-philosopher, an earnest down-to-earth married couple, and a flamboyant poseur who called herself a Baroness. And you can see the just-as-colourful real people on screen in an eye-opening 2012 documentary, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, from film-makers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller.

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Eden begins with the words “Inspired by the accounts of those who survived.” Obviously, some of them didn’t. Howard tells the BBC that, beyond the mystery plot, he saw the real-life people as an intriguing microcosm of human nature. “These people gave us this kind of fun, fascinating study,” he says. “Within it there is suspense and betrayal and violence. There’s tragedy, but there is also humour and there’s nobility. And it all happened in Darwin’s Galapagos.” Indeed, the setting is thematically apt – although Charles Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, based on his 19th-Century studies in the Galapagos, might seem mild next to the wilful human mischief of this group.  

In life and in the film, the first of them to arrive on the island of Floreana was Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law), who moved there from Germany with his lover and acolyte Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) in 1929. Grandiosely planning to write a philosophical work that would offer a new future for all humanity, he figured they’d just leave the world behind. He had his eccentricities. He had all his teeth extracted because, Dore later explained in her memoir, he had “a system of eating which required an intensive mastication of each mouthful”, which had “worn his teeth to stubs”.