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Eden Log Reviews

Full Review | Mar 16, 2011

A passable French sci-fi film, but far from great.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 22, 2009

Eden Log is frustrating to follow and has a protagonist almost completely devoid of personality, but Vestiel does have a certain visual flair, even if in this case it seems more suited to a video game than a movie.

Full Review | May 8, 2009

accepts no emotional stakes in its premise and gives the viewer only the simple task of reaching its finale

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 29, 2009

a dark treat which, far from patronising us with excessive exposition, leaves plenty of room in which the viewer can either wither or flourish

Full Review | Nov 11, 2008

French SF effort that involves a copious amount of grunting . . .

Full Review | Nov 6, 2008

EDEN LOG is visually stunning - it's a bleak trip into a world that both mesmerizing and terrifying.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 7, 2008

Pitched between serious hard sci-fi and a mindless creature feature, it is mostly distinguished by its willingness to immerse its audience in its plot midstream.

Full Review | Original Score: 50/100 | Aug 25, 2008

Cast & crew
User reviews

A man wakes up in an underground cave, next to a dead body. He has no memory of how he got there and starts to try and work his way to the surface and escape from the network of tunnels, whi... Read all A man wakes up in an underground cave, next to a dead body. He has no memory of how he got there and starts to try and work his way to the surface and escape from the network of tunnels, which seem to be some kind of ancient civilisation. A man wakes up in an underground cave, next to a dead body. He has no memory of how he got there and starts to try and work his way to the surface and escape from the network of tunnels, which seem to be some kind of ancient civilisation.

Franck Vestiel
Pierre Bordage
Clovis Cornillac
Vimala Pons
Zohar Wexler
76 User reviews
55 Critic reviews

Top cast 31

Techniciens

(as Abdelkader Dahou)

Femmes Surface
(as Nadia-Layla Bettache)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia There are 11 international teaser trailers for the film (African, Arabic, English, French, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish). Notably, each teaser version is not just a dub, but actually uses a different actress for the opening scene. The only exception being the French and English versions, which use the same actress.
Goofs (at around 30 mins) As Tolbiac is walking through the corridor, the hand of a following crew member can be clearly seen in the lower right corner of the shot.

Man on wall : I don't know how you survived 'til now but please: get away!

Soundtracks Backtrack Composed and performed by Seppuku Paradigm Performed by Melissa Mars

User reviews 76

Apr 10, 2009
How long is Eden Log? Powered by Alexa
December 26, 2007 (France)
Official site (France)
Official site (United States)
Champignonnières de Saint-Gervais, Route d'Ambleville, Saint-Gervais, Val-d'Oise, France
Imperia Films
Trois Huit, Les
See more company credits at IMDbPro
€2,270,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 38 minutes

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Suggestions

Review: franck vestiel’s eden log.

Cornillac’s a veritable cretaceous martyr, man. Why can’t I look away?

Though it looks like a highly polished, quasi-avant-garde bit of speculative fiction, contemporary French sci-fi flick Eden Log is really a far-flung descendant of the Heavy Metal comics of the ’70s and ’80s. That infamous omnibus series, which reached a peak of popularity after the theatrical release of a schlocky 1981 animated movie, trafficked (then and now) in power fantasies for stoners and loners of all sizes. The comics privilege the primitive man’s basest urges, lament society’s fallen state, revel in wanton destruction and feature a wealth of gratuitous cheesecake and nudity. Eden Log has got all that and a grungy, micro-budget look to boot. Director Franck Vestiel and co-writer Pierre Bordage film their Cro-Magnon sci-fi saga with lots of expressionistic front-lit images of an amnesiac explorer (Clovis Cornillac) as he navigates pitch-black caverns to find out who and where he is. It’s too arty to look like Heavy Metal , but at heart, it’s all about beasts, men and spreading the seed of macho chaos.

In Eden Log , Vestiel and Bordage champion a nameless troglodyte because he is, in essence, a mutant. Like the half-breed white cowboys in Westerns who have adopted the more bestial tendencies of their Native American heritage, he’s a new breed of man. Initially awakened by a strobe light that peppers his dark surroundings with white hot illumination, Cornillac’s caveman stumbles around covered in a hardened, greyish gruel that extends from his head to his bare chest. As documented by Vestiel’s pseudo-doc shaky camera, he warily canvases his devastated, subterranean surroundings (overgrown with skeletal tree roots and shorn electrical wires) for a good 20-30 minutes until he encounters someone. He soon realizes that he’s been here before and so starts to clamber around in hopes of understanding his role in this now-abandoned futuristic society.

Slowly, through a number of damaged video consoles and a few armored security guards who are actively seeking him for unknown reasons, Cornillac’s mouth-breather gets the lay of the land. He’s surveying “Eden Log,” a failed Utopian project that harvested a never-ending source of energy from the deep roots of a mysterious Neu-Tree of Life. After several diminishing harvests, the colony’s scientists discover that their Tree requires human fertilizer to continue to serve their needs. Naturally, victims sacrificed to the Tree are people obliquely identified only as “those” and “these populations” by the emotionless, though decidedly female-looking, artificial intelligence that runs “Eden Log.” The only living person Cornillac meets is a female botanist. Being a treacherous female, she of course tries to mine him for data and then use him as a decoy to escape his pursuers. But she only ends up getting raped by him (and liking it, of course) for her sexy, sexy treachery. Eden Log is essentially a more loutish Soylent Green set in a futuristic commune instead of New York City and where “Soylent Green” is not in fact people but rather immigrants and minorities (?) turned into mutants so that a killer Tree can use them as so much mulch. Do the evolution, baby.

If you ignore Eden Log ’s pervasive and, granted, intriguing lo-fi aesthetic, you can look at it as a contemporary complication of its rickety, ideologically unsound foundation. Being an anti-hero for the Information Age, Cornillac figures things out almost entirely from patchy video fragments and memory keys he finds littered throughout the deserted complex. The film takes place in a post-technology era, one where the only surviving data comes in YouTube-sized hunks that Cornillac, our cypher of a central protag, must unite independently. He’s not fighting against the patriarchal, Big Government version of “The Man” from Heavy Metal ’s heyday, but rather today’s less unified, more bureaucratic “The Man,” one represented by the interchangeable, disembodied Robo-Women that haunt the surveillance footage Cornillac pores over. Eden Log ’s “The Man” isn’t anybody really except the specter of institutionalized progress, and because that’s a dirty concept in a Metal-head’s lexicon, it must be represented by complaisant virgin women scientists and malicious ice queen gate-keepers.

The weirdest thing about Eden Log is that, try as you might to completely shelve your feelings about the film’s attractively ominous ambiance, you can’t. If it’s possible, the film’s mood is more in your face than its brain-dead philosophy and hence cannot be ignored, even if it only makes the film an eye-catching dumb show. After all, being a Heavy Metal pastiche means that Eden Log can only have one conclusion, one that mirrors the end of Darren Aronofsky’s infinitely more ambitious The Fountain . The Tree must die and so Cornillac, with his “mutant” genes, must impale himself on its roots and let it suck the tainted, semeny life force out of him. This way, The Tree expands way past any controllable size, the source of “The Man”’s power is overtaxed and its usefulness to civilization is ended. Cornillac’s a veritable cretaceous martyr, man. Why can’t I look away?

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

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Eden Log (Movie Review)

Casey's rating: ★ ★ ★ director: frank vestiel | release date: 2007.

A man; by himself, pitch black surroundings. He has no idea where he his, who he is, or how he got there. All that can be seen is a random strobing light. As he gropes around through the dark, he comes across the corpse of another man. More of a dried husk than a corpse really. He continues to pick his way through the rocky darkness in search of the source of the strobing light. Soon, he stumbles on the broken down remains of some kind of base or fortification in the depths of the cave. As he prods about, he activates a large wall sized view screen. Various voices in a multitude of languages assault him until he is able to focus in on the English speaking voice, which says to him; "Welcome to Eden Log".

With the basic plot setup and the imagery packed into the cover of "Eden Log", my curiosity was instantly peaked. Billed as a science fiction/horror/thriller hybrid, they manage to get most of it right. I say most because there is a large section of this film that I have yet to figure out. Such is the nature of "Eden Log". This is why I would call a "hard" science fiction type movie rather than any form of horror or thriller, the movie was both fascinating and frustrating all the same.

For the fascinating, you simply need to peruse the DVD cover for a taste of what is stored inside. Vesteil employs a masterful use of black and white aesthetics and beautiful vistas, all laid out in a claustrophobic space. It's a look that manages to make the world of "Eden Log" entirely unique. A key element to the movie is the bizarre root system prominently displayed on the cover. These roots are a recurring piece of imagery that play a key role in the story and are used well in both powerful and subtle ways.

We join our nameless amnesiac as he starts his climb through the wastes of Eden Log. Along the way we are given minute bits of information regarding what these roots are. As he climbs through to the light of day, we're also given scraps regarding who our main character is and how he came to find himself in the depths of the cave.

This slow reveal works well in keeping a hold of the viewer's interest. It gives you just enough to lead you on, all in a very "carrot dangled before the horse" type of way. As this goes on, it does make the movie feel somewhat slow and plodding at times. The key to enjoyment however is thinking of this movie as good old fashioned "hard science fiction" film, such as the work of authors like Vernor Vinge. It's not action/sci-fi, it's not horror/sci-fi. It's heavy duty in the sense that there is some strange, real science going on, and that science becomes the focus of "Eden Log", as opposed to jump scares and characters. We experience the character development alongside the main character; he knows as little or as much as we do at any given moment.

"Eden Log" works great but it is an acquired taste. It is slow and dream-like in its unraveling plot. Much of it is convoluted and sometimes confusing which lends to the "hard science fiction" feel as well; if you are in the right mood for such a film though, it works; to a point. Sadly, if you've kept up it all begins to fall apart in the final ten minutes of the movie. Where the film started out feeling like a sci-fi film with an art-house flair, the final ten minutes is filled with nothing but typical art-house confusion. The plot takes a u-turn and jets straight for "what the hell" territory. For me, the ending was nonsensical and full of nothing but unexplained symbolism, which turns the film from "pretty neat" to "holy hell" pretty quickly.

For fans of hard-core science fiction, "Eden Log" is worth checking out. This film is not for everyone. Many viewers will find much to hate amongst the confusion, slow pace and pretentious cinematography. However, for those of us out there with a taste for the strange, this one is passable with the exception of that final scene.

Have you seen "Eden Log" and got the ending figured out? Please tell me. It keeps me awake at night!

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Falling in love with the sounds of his own voice, Casey can be found co-hosting the Bloody Good Horror Podcast, the spinoff Instomatic Podcast as well as the 1951 Down Place Podcast dedicated to Hammer Horror. Casey loves horror films of every budget and lives by his battle cry of 'I watch crap, so you don't have to.'

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Directed by Franck Vestiel

A man wakes up deep inside a cave. Suffering amnesia, he has no recollection of how he came to be here or of what happened to the man whose body he finds beside him. Tailed by a mysterious creature, he must continue through this strange and fantastic world. Enclosed, Tolbiac has no other option to reach the surface than to use REZO ZERO, secret observing cells in this cemetery-like abandoned mine.

Clovis Cornillac Vimala Pons Zohar Wexler Sifan Shao Arben Bajraktaraj Benjamin Baroche Alexandra Ansidei Gabriella Wright Liina Brunelle Alicia Roda Nadia Bettache Eriko Takeda

Director Director

Franck Vestiel

Producer Producer

Cédric Jimenez

Writers Writers

Franck Vestiel Pierre Bordage

Editor Editor

Nicolas Sarkissian

Cinematography Cinematography

Thierry Pouget

Production Design Production Design

Jean-Philippe Moreaux

Composers Composers

Alex Cortés Willie Cortés Seppuku Paradigm

Sound Sound

Eric Cervera Vincent Vatoux Jérôme Wiciak

Costume Design Costume Design

Rachel Quarmby-Spadaccini

Makeup Makeup

Mabi Anzalone Julia Floch-Carbonel

Impéria Bac Films

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

English French German

Releases by Date

26 dec 2007, 29 mar 2008, 19 may 2009, 26 mar 2012, 09 jul 2022, 08 apr 2008, 17 aug 2010, releases by country.

Theatrical 12
Physical DVD
Physical Blu-Ray
Digital VOD
Digital 16 Prime Video
Theatrical 16
Theatrical R

98 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by shookone ★★

a visual delight, but you want to slap the filmmakers for using these sophisticated visuals and prime conditions for a run-of-the-mill script. What a great dystopia the film could have been, a man literally "crawls" out of the mud of the earth to the surface, gradually recognizes the failure of humanity and constantly fights against the environment using his physical strength. The guy is as clueless as the story though and we are getting lost together with him. EDEN LOG is long-winded, confusing and unfocussed, which leaves you to grief about the excellent visuals and their path into the void. Franck Vestiel's film is reminiscent of RENAISSANCE and similar films of recent years in its wasted opportunities.

Review by Steph_h ★★★

Slightly confusing , pretty cool looking tech noir ... I enjoyed it but wish I understood it a bit better , having read some Reddit threads it confirmed a little of what I know but I still can’t quite put this altogether and I’m not so sure anyone else has either. Our main character awakes not knowing who he is and then It all takes place in an underground bunker which is extremely well textured, dirty, disgusting, full of monsters and security troops. There’s some random projections being played on walls that sometimes give us insight into wtf is happening but generally were in the dark mentally and physically, this has got to be one of the darkest shot things I’ve ever seen. Overall I liked this , it brought me back to stuff like pandorum, resident evil, cube & the descent ... of you’re into sci-fi horror I’d say check it out .

Review by DavidB ★★

Log, as in; turd.

Review by Alex Monge ½ 3

A complete waste of time.

Review by Tim Timmermans ★★½

BAMN #5, second movie For our second movie, Marco suggested to watch 'Eden Log', an underground (also literally for most of the time) monochromatic sci-fi movie from France. It tells the story of a man waking up in a puddle of mud and not remembering who he is. As he moves through underground cave systems, he slowly discovers where he is and what his part is in all of it. The plot is a bit convoluted, but the atmosphere that's created, is a lot more enjoyable. Overall a decent watch and another remarkable example of what can be reached with a (super) low budget and a lot of passion.

Review by kuboa ★★★

Dreamlike, disorienting, pulsing with chthonic atmosphere; these qualities are just barely fascinating enough to outweigh the rest of the bad, especially the Eurotrash ‘acting’ and garbled writing, which at its few coherent points appears to be a rehash of standard dystopian tropes ( Bioshock comes to mind). Eden Log achieves an impressively detailed environment on a modest budget, but everything else seems like an afterthought. The protagonist pushes the narrative forward in a linear way that recalls the player dynamics of an adventure video game, exploring an unfamiliar world while overcoming puzzles and challenges; generously this is the film’s way of giving you permission to turn your brain off and simply enjoy the ambience. Unfortunately it occasionally remembers that it’s meant to be a movie rather than a trippy tech demo. The few attempts at drama (especially one particular fight sequence) are obnoxious distractions that could be excised with no downside.

Review by Luke Ponto ★★★

It wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be. I loved the concept but some of the execution didn’t do it for me.

Review by suttercain ★★

Bad but interesting.

Review by weehunk ★

I know that when I wake up from the primordial ooze I'm not particularly in the mood to solve puzzles. I hit the snooze button a couple of times, take a shower. Also, I don't particularly like being chased by monsters or talk to French people. Not my cup of tea.

Review by Zolidus ★★★

This is a bit like the cube movies. The movie feels a bit to small and it feels like being stuck in a level in a pc game being stuck in a dungeon trying to find the way out.

Review by MrYoshimitsu ½

"Ich war der Architekt dieser Lüge."

Dem Narrativ eines Videospiel folgend erzählt der Film wenig bis nichts. Optisch ganz nett aber das wars.

Review by Rick D ★

This is a movie I really wanted to like better, but the pacing was so slow I found myself nodding off.

French Science Fiction.

A man awakens with no recollection of where he is or who he is. He begins a journey through a desolate building where through memory chips and meetings with others the story begins to unfold.

The film is in B&W, but I really wanted the flick to not be so dark and color would have been awesome. I also really had a difficult time with hearing the dialogue which didn't help my understanding of the story.

Some cool concepts. Some pretty sweet creatures that I thought were wasted. Some kick ass cop costumes that lasted maybe 5 minutes. An end that didn't make a lot of sense to me.

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> Eden Log (2007) Film Review

Reviewed by: Anton Bitel

He may have made two (or five, if you count the various director's cuts) of the best known and most loved films in the genre, but if you were to try to pinpoint Ridley Scott 's original contribution to science fiction, it might be summed up by the word "dust". Before Alien and Blade Runner , the future was a bright, clean and sparkly place, no matter how dirty and dystopian its politics – but Scott was the first to show space-age polish at permanent war with encroaching grime, as though no amount of sleek technology could quite cover over humankind's origins in the mud.

A similar principle is at work in Franck Vestiel's low-budget debut Eden Log, which begins, like life itself, in a pool of primal ooze. From this there emerges a man (Clovis Cornillac), gasping for breath, covered in filth and no less disoriented than the viewer. As he gropes his way upwards through his dark, dank surroundings towards some kind of illuminating truth about who, and where, he might be, he takes us on an allegorical journey that will accommodate all manner of theological, social and ecological concerns, and will end in a city of pristine beauty whose paradisiac qualities have already been undermined by the filth, abjection and horror exposed beneath. This is a long way from the space opera of Star Wars , but those who like a more transcendental brand of SF (think 2001: A Space Odyssey , Solaris or The Fountain ) will find themselves on familiar ground.

Eden Log is structured like a video game. Our amnesiac hero (if, indeed, he is a hero) ascends through different levels of tree roots, mud and machinery, on the way receiving obscure clues and fragments of information, facing various opponents (ferocious subterranean mutant workers, ambiguous technicians, and armed guards from the surface) and having to come to terms with his own unique status in the world of Eden Log.

Mood is key here. The wonderful underground sets drip with atmosphere, and have been shot with filmstock so utterly desaturated that it takes a while to realise there is any colour at all. The protagonist spends the first ten minutes of the film grunting incoherently, and even when he begins to speak, asks questions rather than making statements. Such action as there is tends to be impressionistic instead of graphic, and even the explanations offered by the technicians are fragmented and allusive.

There is a lot going on here. Vestiel's stylishly bleak parable of paradise lost dramatises humankind's unbounded capacity to exploit everything, including other humans. Its world is divided into all-too-recognisable hierarchies of haves and have-nots, and while these may be as old (in SF terms) as HG Wells' novella The Time Machine (1895) and Fritz Lang's groundbreaking film Metropolis (1927), the arresting image here of the 'strange fruit' engendered by slavery is utterly original. Meanwhile Vestiel's Tree of Life taps into current preoccupations with the environment (with mankind at the root of all evil), while also pointing to all manner of religious archetypes.

Perhaps, however, the film also suffers from the combined effect of a slow pace and a highly elliptical narrative, which will put many viewers off watching it a second time, even if seeing it just the once may not be quite enough to appreciate fully the many suggestive nuances that branch out like roots from its core. Stick with it, though, and you are in for a dark treat which, far from patronising us with excessive exposition, leaves plenty of room in which the viewer can either wither or flourish – and those patient enough to last to the end will be rewarded with a truly haunting final image that is well worth the wait. Eden Log is far from perfect, but it has enough ideas to emerge on its own two feet from the cinematic sludge, and marks Vestiel as a real talent to watch.

Director: Franck Vestiel

Writer: Pierre Bordage, Franck Vestiel

Starring: Cloris Cornillac, Vimala Pons, Zohar Wexler, Sifan Shao, Arben Bajraktaraj, Abdekader Dahou, Tony Amoni, Antonin Bastian

Runtime: 97 minutes

Country: France

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Movie Review: Eden Log

Allow me to begin with a warning: EDEN LOG is a dark film. And by “dark,” I mean dim. And by “dim,” I don’t mean unintelligent. I mean, you better not be watching this film on an old-school LCD or with any ambient light in the room. The best way to view this flick is by unbolting your plasma from the wall and crawling under a blanket with it. But wait! Is there anything in this film worth seeing? What in the world is this French film even about?

It’s a tough question, because EDEN LOG defies categorization. Director Franck Vestiel didn’t create a horror film, because there’s nothing scary about it. The creatures that inhabit the film’s dismal underworld are always kept at bay. Often, this is done with the clever use of saran wrap, a foil on violence not matched since M. Night Shamalamalahayha introduced space-faring aliens that were flummoxed by doorknobs. Other times, the creatures are just annoying, screeching backdrop. They run past our protagonist harmlessly. Or Eden Log Guards traverse a gangway on a different level–more far-off non-threats.

The film isn’t Science Fiction, either. For one thing, there isn’t any science. Nothing is explained except for an 8-bit representation of immigrants being fed into a tree, which in turn produces sap, which in turn powers the big, evil city that is raping the lands, killing the trees, and subverting immigrant culture. I’m starting to think we need a new genre for these films about science fucking everything up. With the Green Revolution in full swing, it’s going to be the rare film that allows science to be cool. Is “Science Fucktion” taken?

One of the staples of a good Science Fucktion film is the glaring omission of anything that might pass for science. EDEN LOG nails this requirement in spades. Instead of computer monitors, let’s give everyone projectors with a ten-foot throw, but not give them screens. Or lets have the projector shine the images right on their face. Hey, it will seem artsy, even if it makes no sense. And while we’re putting a light on a guard’s chest to illuminate the room ahead, let’s add one to the shoulder that shines a light in the wearer’s face. Forget reason, it’ll create cool shadows on our hero’s noggin. Another Science Fucktion staple: the notion that form over function will benefit the world.

If you’re wondering why I’ve gone on this long without explaining the plot of EDEN LOG, it’s to give you a taste for what the director put me through. This Jeremiad consists of a ten-minute explanation that you’ll be force-fed after 90 minutes of a dude ( Clovis Cornillac ) walking around doing one of three things: (1) Saying he doesn’t know what’s going on (2) Screaming like a werewolf (3) Raping a girl in an elevator. Everything else is our main character staggering around in the dark or watching the girl from (3) perform a trapeze act while she talks with a male voice.

The shame of this film is that the idea was wasted on the wrong medium. EDEN LOG should have been a video game. You walk around in the dark, listen to the log files of dead scientists as you piece together a crap plot, and then walk around in the dark some more. At the end of the game, you’ll get a 5-minute cut-scene explaining what the hell you’ve been doing for the last eight hours of game play. The reason this would work is because you’d have something to do while you were walking around in the dark… you’d be shooting the shit out of scary monsters and guards. Egads! That’s Doom 3, FEAR, FEAR 2, Roddick: Butcher’s Bay and Area 51.

So, stay away from this one until the game adaptation comes out. What small merit the film had died quietly in the last scene. As a solitary tear rolls down our silly protagonist’s face, the lights in the evil city wink out. We’re supposed to be sad for Mother Earth and the harm we cause. Science Fucktion, people. I’m sorry, but even if this film made sense, was properly lit, and had half of a scary scene in it, I would still consider it garbage. The environmental fanaticism we get, instead of a decent plot, ruins everything.

Message from the sun, people: Says here that it has 5 billion years of free energy that it’ll send our way. This includes oil–the leftover plant and animal matter built via photosynthesis. The message from the sun suggests that we will not run out of energy for 5 billion years. After that, it says it’s going to swell up and rid Earth of all life. Period.

Wow. Sounds sinister. Someone should make a low-budget horror film around this premise, it’ll be the bomb. Oh. Nevermind .

Purchase “Eden Log” from Amazon

Ron Howard Has Finally Lost His Mind

Ron Howard’s reputation as a Hollywood stalwart who crafted classy hits and middlebrow prestige pictures always masked where his true skills lay – in his ability to take larger-than-life characters and bounce them off one another. It’s why some of his films ( The Missing , The Dilemma , Frost/Nixon , Night Shift , even those silly Dan Brown adaptations) are effectively buddy movies, sometimes secretly so. It’s also why he so often adapted true-life stories ( Apollo 13 , Cinderella Man , Thirteen Lives , [sigh] Hillbilly Elegy ). Reality, or at least the semblance of reality, provided cover for his attraction to extreme personalities. As did his solid, glossy approach to craft: He built compelling, well-proportioned narratives around people who threatened to send the stories spinning in all sorts of nutty directions. He’s done the same with his new film, Eden , too. But this time, Howard — to his eternal credit — lets the craziness take over. He’s got a deserted island in the Galapagos, and five wild men and women to play off one another, each portrayed by an actor going full tilt.

The remarkable premise is, indeed, based on a true story. (We even get the obligatory closing credits footage of some of the real personages, though this time they don’t provoke oohs and aahs so much as bafflement that any of what we watched could ever have happened.) In 1929, as the world was reeling from financial and political chaos, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) decamped to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos, he to create “a radical new philosophy that will save humanity from itself,” and she to provide moral support while trying to heal her multiple sclerosis. They might have shunned bourgeois society, but they were also eager to promote themselves. They sent letters abroad, and fantastical articles in German papers touted Ritter’s bold new experiment. And so, Eden begins in 1932, with the arrival of Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Bruhl), a World War I veteran, his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney), and their son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) to Floreana, seeking paradise and a fresh start. What they find is an uninhabitable wilderness without fresh water, where wild hogs prey on anything one might try to grow, and stray dogs lurk everywhere, ready to pounce on the weak.

They also find that the embittered Ritter, for all his ambitions to make the world a better place and save humanity, really fucking hates people. He sends the guileless Wittmers off to live in a cave up a hill, hoping this will drive them away. Or maybe he thinks the struggle will cure what ails them. Ritter believes in agony. “What is the true meaning of life?” he asks in his work. “Pain. In pain we find truth. And in truth, salvation.” In fact, others’ suffering turns him on. After witnessing the early struggles of the Wittmers, Ritter and his wife hop into bed together, and Howard intercuts their lovemaking with Heinz Wittmer stumbling up a hill. We might begin to wonder if all this suffering is turning the director on, too.

One day, into the middle of this simmering standoff on the edge of nowhere enters the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), who arrives on the island with two hunky lovers (Feliz Kammerer and Toby Wallace) and a plan to build a luxury hotel for millionaires. She has elegant clothes, records, books, and not a clue about what she’s doing. If Ritter is a masochist and a sadist, Eloise is a pure hedonist. She’s also a narcissist and a neurotic. She pitches her tent right near the Wittmers’ home, so they can hear her furiously having sex with her boy toys at all times. She repeats to herself, “I am the embodiment of perfection,” as if trying to convince herself. We don’t know what her story really is; even her accent seems fake. And Armas plays her with live-wire unpredictability. We can never tell what Eloise will do next, whether she’ll demonstrate cruelty or compassion, whether she’ll seduce or attack. That uncertainty gives her an almost satanic power over the people around her, as well as over the viewer.

Uncharacteristically, Howard embraces the messiness of these people and the contradictions of their lives. Eloise might soon settle into a villainous role, and she is certainly manipulative, and a little mad, but she also inspires the Wittmers’ ill son to dream of freedom and a better life, as she herself probably once did. We see how vulnerable she is, which makes her both more captivating and more dangerous. Everybody else is on uncertain ground as well. We hear Ritter’s philosophical ramblings on the soundtrack, spoken in almost stentorian voiceover — but we also recognize that at least some of it is nonsense. At times, Ritter pauses, repeats and corrects himself, complains that what he just uttered was too much like Nietzsche, then tries anxiously to come up with something original to say. This man is no visionary; he’s just trying to make a name for himself. For all her outward support, his wife has clearly begun to have her doubts about her beloved prophet. Kirby, who is always so good at subtly slithering from one emotional extreme to another, here remains ever watchful, ever tense — we feel that she might be capable of great violence at all times.

Wittmer and his wife, who outwardly seem to be the wide eyed, mild-mannered audience surrogates stuck in the middle of all this nuttiness, get their own wild journeys as well. He, after all, is a man broken by the war — it’s the reason why they came here in the first place. 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.

The pressures of the untamed setting, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets loopier as it goes on. But it pulls us along, too. There’s an earthy savagery at the heart of Eden that consumes not just the people onscreen but the people in the audience, too; our own bloodlust is provoked, as if to prove the point that there’s something rotten lurking in the hearts of all people. In the past, when he got close to something too dark and unhinged, Howard tended to pull back. He’s had some films, like In the Heart of the Sea , that needed to go a little crazier to work. With Eden , it seems, he’s finally allowed himself to lose his mind, and it might be the best decision he’s made in years.

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Eden is an uneven survival drama with compelling performances from Jude Law and Daniel Brühl

The core story of "Eden" is fascinating, but the film can't rise above two lackluster performances from its leading ladies.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

If Eden were a book and not a film, it would be one of those massive historical tomes that your dad puts atop his Christmas list.

As a movie, the true story is still essentially a classic dad yarn, perhaps even director Ron Howard's "Roman Empire." Howard loves true stories, and Eden , which premiered Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a particularly audacious entry in his filmography.

Dr. Friedrich Ritter ( Jude Law ) and partner Dora ( Vanessa Kirby ) pursue a utopian life of isolation on the uninhabited Floreana in the Galapagos Islands. Ritter's mission is to escape the world and write his philosophical magnum opus, which he hopes will change society at its core. But when published accounts of his letters make him famous in Europe, he and Dora find their solitude disturbed. First, the Wittmers arrive — Heinz ( Daniel Brühl ), Margaret ( Sydney Sweeney ), and tubercular son Harry (Jonathan Tittel).

But despite Ritter's attempts to scare them off by settling them in an inhospitable area, the Wittmers build a life for themselves that defies the odds. That is until Baroness Eloise and an excess of other names ( Ana de Armas ) and her lovers descend upon the island with an outlandish scheme to build a luxury hotel. From there, this hard-scrabble Eden, a place of tough but honest living, descends into a Lord of the Flies- esque carnival of manipulation, competition, and violence.

Howard, working from a script by Noah Pink, has a lot of plates to keep spinning, including the story's wild swings between outrageous outbursts, sometimes played for laughs, and dog-eat-dog tension. Inevitably, with such an act, a few plates are bound to break.

Jasin Boland/Courtesy of TIFF

Law goes balls out (literally) in crafting the narcissistic megalomaniac that is Ritter, a man who deifies Nietzsche. The British actor continues his run of extreme character choices while still employing his leading man charms and swagger as the fiercest weapons in Ritter's arsenal. Kirby goes toe-to-toe with him as Dora, a woman increasingly irritated by a dynamic where she does all the housework while her man pursues his art. She gives Dora a feral, hungry demeanor, crafting a portrait of a woman desperate for a miracle to take away her pain (Dora has MS, we learn). However, despite a strong showing from Kirby in the film's first act, she is severely underused. Her subtleties are forced to play second fiddle to Law's (enjoyable) scenery-chewing.

Brühl, who Howard endeared to American audiences in 2013's Rush , is the steadiest, most dialed-in member of the cast. His Heinz is in noble pursuit of a better life, even if he must hold off the ghosts of his time as a World War I infantryman that lurk just behind his eyes.

Sweeney plays against type as a meek, dowdy wife fighting to find her voice. There are scenes where she hints at possibilities of something greater, most notably when she goes through labor while fending off a pack of wild dogs. But she has yet to give a complete performance that can convince me that she can be a great actress. The emotional weight and catharsis of the film rests on her slight shoulders, and it threatens to consume her.

By and large, her performance detracts from the quality of the film. Her German accent fails to pass muster (I've heard better in high school productions of Cabaret ). More distractingly, it's an unfortunate fact that Sweeney is not suited for a period piece. She has the energy of a modern woman, and it's impossible to believe this is a human being who existed prior to the internet. It's such a distinctive factor of her being that every time the camera is on her, it takes you out of the world and its storytelling.

De Armas also takes a big swing as the self-obsessed, dangerously confident Baroness. She prowls through every scene, attempting to use her faux grandeur and oozing sexuality to get her way. But we can tell in an instant that she's a charlatan, and so can everyone on Floreana. Like her work in Blonde, De Armas substitutes overt sexuality for character study, hoping bravado can obscure her shortcomings. It's over-the-top, and it's unclear if the Baroness is just bad at seduction or if that's a fault of the performance.

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Eden is an odd fit for Howard as a director. It has the historical credentials of his last decade-plus of films, with his pursuit of stories that are stranger than fiction ( In the Heart of the Sea, Thirteen Lives, etc.). But it's meaner and far more brutal than his usual fare. The film is beautifully directed, particularly in how it captures the stark beauty of nature largely untouched by man. But it lacks some of that feel-good, can-do spirit that has often made Howard's work stand out amidst more pessimistic auteurs.

The story behind Eden is scintillating. I'd watch a documentary on it right now. And as a piece of narrative historical fiction, it has the potential to be fodder for a great thriller. Here, the end result is more of an erratic blend of survival drama, historical oddity, and petty domestic intrigue that boils down into a morass of standout moments dragged down by the film's weaknesses as a whole. Grade: C+

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‘Eden’: Toronto Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2024-09-08T07:36:00+01:00

Ron Howard turns to the dark side with this star-studded true story of an island utopia gone bad starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas

Source: Imagine Entertainment

Dir: Ron Howard. US. 2024. 129mins

In a film littered with monstrous behaviour and murderous acts, what is perhaps most shocking about Eden is the director behind it. In Ron Howard’s work, the best of humanity usually shines brightest but, with this intense psychological thriller, he reveals a different side, charting the growing resentments on a remote island in the Galapagos populated by a handful of people who do not wish to share this idyllic spot with one another. Inspired by actual events which took place almost a century ago, the picture gives Jude Law and Ana de Armas an opportunity to be unapologetically rotten, resulting in a grim, feverish film that feels touched by madness.

Howard fails to modulate the wickedness and, at over two hours, the picture becomes monotonous and unwieldy

Eden premieres as a Gala Presentation in Toronto, and the film features an impressive supporting cast that includes Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby and Howard’s Rush star Daniel Brühl. UK and key international territiories went to Amazon Prime at Cannes, but the US rights on this key feature were still available going into TIFF.

In 1932, Heinz (Brühl) and Margret Witmer (Sweeney) journey to Floreana on the Galapagos Islands, where they wish to meet Friedrich (Law), a German doctor and philosopher who believes humanity is doomed. Living alone with his sullen lover Dore (Kirby), Friedrich has decamped to Floreana to start his idealised new society — and does not want to be disturbed by the Witmers, whom he dismisses as tourists. But both families will soon encounter another interloper, the Baroness (de Armas), who has designs on building a luxury hotel on the beach.

Drawing from conflicting reports from the island’s survivors, Noah Pink’s screenplay introduces us to Floreana’s treacherous terrain and mostly miserable inhabitants. Save for the kindly Witmers, everyone else we meet in Eden is self-centred, manipulative or outright evil. Heinz and Margret came to the Galapagos because they believed in Friedrich’s vision of building a utopia after the horrors of the First World War, but the married couple’s interactions with the pretentious doctor quickly make it clear that his idealism has curdled into solipsism and self-righteousness. Friedrich wanted the seclusion to write his manifesto but it may have also driven him slightly insane, and Law makes a meal out of Friedrich’s haughty nature.

When the Baroness arrives, de Armas gives the picture a wicked jolt, playing thischaracter as a flirty schemer who enjoys charming the men around her. It’s a theatrical performance — we have no doubt she’s not as posh as she lets on — and the Oscar-nominated actress relishes the character’s shameless behaviour. While many of Eden ’s participants will eventually get in touch with their darker natures, the Baroness is up to no good from the start, quickly locating insecurities and exploiting them. At its best, Eden ripples with an unhinged lunatics-running-the-asylum maliciousness, and de Armas personifies the picture’s fixation on its irredeemable souls, its sense of a society quickly devolving into chaos and hedonism.

Whether it’s Mathias Herndl’s grey cinematography or Hans Zimmer’s mournful score, the film hints early on that terrible consequences await these people as their halfhearted attempts to coexist quickly go by the wayside. Howard embraces the story’s demented bent, offering the viewer kinky sex and tawdry threesomes — not to mention a level of brutality unique to his oeuvre. If Eden has any glimpse of a happy ending, it is hard-earned and haunted by all that come before.

Unfortunately, Howard fails to modulate this wickedness and, at over two hours, the picture becomes monotonous and unwieldy. Indeed, the malicious proceedings lose their power to unnerve, to diminishing returns. As twisted as the characters are, their psychology is rarely explored with finesse. These people may be bad but their rottenness comes across as arbitrary, which works against the filmmaker’s Lord Of The Flies -like portrait of humanity eating itself. For once in a Ron Howard film, there are few nice guys to be found — but his dance with the devil suggests that, although there is something energising about this change of pace, he can’t quite connect with the evil that permeates his film.

Production company: Imagine Entertainment

International sales: AGS Studios, [email protected] / US sales: CAA, Christine Hsu, [email protected]

Producers: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Karen Lunder, Stuart Ford, William M. Connor, Patrick Newall

Screenplay: Noah Pink, story by Noah Pink and Ron Howard

Cinematography: Mathias Herndl

Production design: Michelle McGahey

Editing: Matt Villa

Music: Hans Zimmer

Main cast: Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Jonathan Tittel, Richard Roxburgh

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‘Eden’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Steals the Show in Ron Howard’s Darkly Silly Historical Thriller

TIFF 2024: The “Anyone but You” star upstages Jude Law and Ana de Armas in this solid effort from the Oscar-nominated filmmaker

Director Ron Howard has always been a fascinating filmmaker. He’s delivered some of the most entertaining American films ever made, like “Apollo 13,” as well as complete and total disasters, like “Hillbilly Elegy.” That makes “Eden,” a solid yet darkly silly historical thriller set on a remote uninhabited island in the Galápagos, such a breath of fresh air. It’s not his greatest work, but it’s still the type of film that you exhale upon seeing as you realize he’s still got some heaters.

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.

The film, which premiered Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival and is based on true events, takes place in 1929 where people are still reeling from WWI and questioning what it is that has consumed the world. Two of them, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his partner Dora Strauch (Kirby), flee to the isle of Floreana. Friedrich aims to write the manifesto to save the world and while she hopes to heal from her multiple sclerosis by meditating, but that is soon upended by a family that has followed them. Margaret (Sweeney) and her husband Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), along with their ailing son, go to the island in the hope of joining the good doctor in living a life free from violence where they can build their own utopia. What they discover is a brutish, uncaring man who wants to be left alone to write and a harsh climate that could destroy them.

Even when they manage to survive, more visitors soon come that again threaten the delicate balance on the island. Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (de Armas), whose entrance is the first hint of the film’s sly sense of humor, intends to make a hotel there despite how inhospitable it all is. As the seasons pass, tensions begin to hit a breaking point, leaving these neighbors to discover what values they really hold, what they’ll be willing to toss aside and who they’re capable of hurting so they can continue to remain alive.

Any other details about who turns on who and what they inflict upon each other is best left unsaid as revealing anything more would rob the experience of the film’s full punch. The way that writer Noah Pink, best known for last year’s “ Tetris ,” expertly ratchets up the tension demonstrates a refreshing degree of patience and a playful sense of humor. Some of this comes down to how the entire cast is going for it with Law’s frightening Friedrich striking an imposing figure without any teeth (which he delusionally removed himself). As he grows increasingly menacing and insecure, we see that he is no insightful philosopher, but a pitiful man ranting to nobody.

Indeed, one of the best gags comes early when we hear his droning internal monologue interrupted by Margaret, who cheerfully comes to visit and ask him questions. Sweeney, long an underestimated performer despite how in command of her characters she is, hits all the right notes to make these small moments sing.

Though de Armas is certainly giving the most goofy performance and doing it quite well, Sweeney is the film’s soul. If anything, the moments when Margaret fades into the background leave a void. We’re often left with Brühl, who is the one performer that can’t quite find his footing. This could be by design, as the way everything ties together makes clear Sweeney was actually the center of “Eden” all along, but it still holds the film back from being as great as it could be.

These are small hang-ups that can’t fully take away from what is still a solid thriller from top to bottom. When Sweeney blows the doors off the film with one critical scene near the end, it only makes you want to watch it all back again to take a closer look — this performance has layers. When you do, in addition to seeing that there was no paradise to be found for most of the people who tried to make a go of it on the island, you see the one truly in real command was also the one that was the most overlooked.

If Howard and Sweeney can make movies together like this all the time, may neither of them ever stop.

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