‘Eden’ Review: Ron Howard’s Galápagos Nightmare Blurs Drama, Farce, and Disaster (Prime Video)

Ron Howard’s long career seems to fall into distinct phases — many of them, it must be said, more by accident than by design. As a child and teenager in the 1960s and early ’70s, he was best known as an actor, appearing in The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, and films like American Graffiti. By the late ’70s, he had turned to directing and has devoted himself almost entirely to that ever since, though shifting in style and ambition over the decades.

Howard became a major name in the 1980s with popular comedies such as Splash and Cocoon. The following decade saw him pursuing more prestigious fare like The Paper and Apollo 13, a run that culminated in his Oscar win for A Beautiful Mind (2001). Since then, his work has oscillated between big commercial productions (The Da Vinci Code and its sequels, Solo: A Star Wars Story) and occasional strong efforts like Rush, mixed in with a series of forgettable films that barely made a dent at the box office despite high budgets and starry casts.

Eden falls squarely into the latter category. Now 71, Howard was reportedly fascinated by the true story on which the film is based, but watching it, it becomes clear this is not a world that fits easily within his filmmaking instincts. The large-scale settings and period reconstruction suit him — as in In the Heart of the Sea, Cinderella Man, or The Missing — but the film’s darker, rougher edges and undercurrent of cruelty feel foreign to his sensibility. Eden recounts a disturbing real event with an unsettling psychological dimension, yet the result never quite captures the menace or madness of the material, caught between classical storytelling and odd stylistic choices.

Set in the 1930s on the small island of Floreana, part of Ecuador’s Galápagos archipelago, the film follows a group of German expatriates who settle there in search of a new beginning. The narrator is Margaret (Sydney Sweeney), the young second wife of Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), who has arrived with their tubercular son Harry (Jonathan Tittel). They’ve been inspired by the writings of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law), a German doctor who abandoned civilization to move there with his wife Dora (Vanessa Kirby), hoping both to treat her multiple sclerosis and to write a grand philosophical treatise — one whose nature is never quite explained, though it clearly captivated Heinz.

Their arrival is not warmly received. The Ritters are determined to live in isolation and want no part of their new neighbors. Following a twisted interpretation of Nietzsche’s teachings, Friedrich does everything he can to antagonize the newcomers, hoping they’ll realize how harsh and perilous island life really is and decide to leave. But that’s nothing compared to what comes next: another German arrival, a self-proclaimed baroness (Ana de Armas), accompanied by two lovers (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace), a towering ego, and a plan to build a luxury hotel on the island. Her presence inflames the already tense relations, and the rest of Eden unfolds as a series of increasingly violent and absurd confrontations.

Howard makes two unusual creative choices that give the film a strangely offbeat tone. The first concerns language: all the characters speak English with exaggerated German accents — so exaggerated, in fact, that it borders on parody, as if lifted from a 1930s melodrama set during the interwar years. Perhaps this was deliberate (two of the actors, after all, are actually German), suggesting that this “German-accented English” stands in for the real language. But the effect is often distracting, even comical.

And that’s before mentioning Ana de Armas’s performance. Her baroness seems to have wandered in from one of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films — an eccentric character who needs to exaggerate her mannerisms to seem credible, yet De Armas plays her as an outright caricature. Whether she’s truly a baroness or merely a delusional opportunist remains unclear, but her flamboyant performance pushes Eden dangerously close to unintentional self-parody. That might have worked if the rest of the cast were in on the joke, but Sweeney and Brühl, in particular, play their roles with dead-serious conviction, as though in a grim psychological drama. The result is a tonal tug-of-war that rarely finds balance.

If you can look past those distractions, the film proceeds along fairly predictable lines: three isolated households locked in escalating conflict, with betrayals, lust, and madness brewing beneath the tropical sun. Along the way, Howard adds a difficult childbirth, a few sex scenes (in twos and threes), a handful of knives and rifles, a possible poisoning, and the unforgettable image of Jude Law without teeth — his character has had them all removed to prevent infection and wears a metal prosthesis only to eat. The conflicts erupt quickly and never subside; even fleeting moments of alliance end in fresh backstabbing and bloodshed.

The events are drawn from reality, though versions of the story vary widely. Howard chooses to tell it from the point of view of Margaret, the most grounded of this island’s self-made outcasts — a seemingly sane observer among a colony of narcissists and psychotics chasing a paradise that could never exist. Beneath its surface, Eden contains intriguing ideas, particularly in how it depicts a group of Germans who, having fled their homeland during the rise of the Third Reich, still replicate a disturbingly Darwinian worldview. Yet those ideas are buried under stylistic missteps and performances that often feel miscalibrated. When the characters start speaking like villains from a bad 1940s war movie, it becomes difficult to take the film — or its moral ambitions — seriously.