Eden Squanders Its A-List Cast with a Limp Takedown of Human Nature

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Ron Howard is a filmmaker with a varied reputation: a consummate pro who’s spent his whole life working in entertainment; Hollywood’s wholesome journeyman; a technically proficient hack with a tedious vision. His popcorn fare has been noted for uncomplicated heart and spectacle, and the tonal gap between material like Backdraft and The Da Vinci Code indicates he’s savvy enough to know where the pop cultural wind is blowing. He’s no stranger to box office success – Splash, How the Grinch Stole Christmas – but in the last 20 years, only his Robert Langdon trilogy have been runaway smash hits.

It feels like this downward trend is showing no signs of stopping, as despite an all-star cast – Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl – and a scandal and intrigue-tinted survival story, Eden has sat in post-premiere limbo after first screening at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Unlike the majority of Howard’s work, Eden didn’t already have a distributor when it debuted, and didn’t find one until deep into 2025. Howard has described his film as an indie, but independent distributors don’t typically rush after middlingly reviewed films with reported budgets of $30-50 million – no matter how sellable their premise and cast may be.

Eden dramatizes a mysterious chapter of history – in 1929, fleeing the social and financial chaos of post-WW1 Europe (not to mention the rise of fascism), a gaggle of Germans moved to the isolated, unpeopled Floreana in the Galápagos islands. The unorthodox radical Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his wife Dora Strauch (Kirby) built a small, self-sustaining domicile on the island, surviving on rainwater and vegetables (despite the edible wildlife on Floreana; the Ritters are vegetarian). Here, Dora treats her multiple sclerosis in isolation and her husband writes a manifesto laying out a new, radical model for society.

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Ritter also pens letters to newspapers across the world reporting on their progress, which soon draws a zealous acolyte Heinz Wittmer (Brühl) across the ocean with his young wife Margaret (Sweeney) and Harry (Jonathan Tittel), a son from Heinz’s prior marriage. Their presence on Floreana is not readily welcomed by the Ritters; Law and Kirby channel some reflexive English rudeness into their German characters in their initial, delightfully tense encounters. The Wittmers are put off by the harshness of their new environment – and the coldness of their admirable neighbors – but their Protestant work ethic serves them well, and they start to build a peaceful and fruitful life.

This early section is when Eden feels most in control – Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink neglect the rich ideological undercurrent to Floreana’s tensions (this is a colonial enterprise and a rejection of bourgeois society, after all) but if Eden only cares about feuding personalities and the broad beats of survival disaster drama, then at least the Ritter and Wittmer tensions are enjoyably prickly and draw us into the island’s unstable dynamics. Brühl and Sweeney play their characters as unbearably upright and respectful, making them prime targets for the Ritters’ psychological games – Dora refusing to loan her perfectly available donkey to Margaret being a highlight.

The first step toward losing paradise comes with the arrival of Baroness Von Wagner (Ana de Armas) and her entourage of good-looking young men on Floreana’s shores. De Armas sets the tone for the hysterical performances that will define Eden’s descent into violence and ruin – it’s obvious the Baroness is exaggerating some part of her aristocratic means and sophistication, but Howard lets the actress fall into an arrogant, hypersexual caricature, and his camera greedily records the expressions of discomfort on the other characters’ faces. This awkwardness, the fear that these disparate personalities will snap at each other, is occasionally lively and amusing, but it grows tiresome when it becomes clear that Eden is happy to procedurally reveal that each of these characters is, in fact, doomed for some degree of failure.

The last stretch of compelling drama comes when Allan Hancock (Richard Roxburgh), a rich American, visits Floreana and temporarily breaks the spell of resentment that’s settled over the characters. Roxburgh relishes the savvy, wealthy swagger of his explorer character. When Hancock tells Ritter he’s brought much-needed supplies, the stubborn doctor breaks down in relief; when the Baroness tries to extract some pleasure and support from the millionaire, he calls out her performance in a way that has eluded the other islanders. Through Hancock (who actually made his own film with the Baroness during his visit), Eden finally touches on its murky, contradictory treatment of explorer ideology and its performative qualities – but it’s far too brief a treatment to convince us of lofty thematic ambition.

Being miserable and fatalistic is perfectly acceptable for a survival drama, but Howard is happy to paint the Galápagos affair in the boldest, brashest emotional tones, so the ugly payoff to the “hate triangle” of Floreana’s settlers feels stagey, clumsy and anticlimactic. How are we supposed to be shocked by murderous fallout if the concept of harmony and empathy have rarely – if at all – been considered by the characters, who Howard and Pink refuse to inflect with ambiguity? The Galápagos affair has been shrouded in mystery for 90 years, but Eden doesn’t offer us convincing insight. It’s film built from obvious assumptions about what happened there, gained from a frustrating distance.

Director: Ron Howard
Writer: Noah Pink
Stars: Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney, Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, Felix Kammerer, Toby Wallace, Richard Roxburgh
Release date: Aug. 22, 2025

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.