Sydney Sweeney gives birth to a child among fighting dogs

TORONTO, Canada – Company causes misery in EdenRon Howard's true-life thriller about a group of disparate souls whose search for freedom, rebirth and redemption is thwarted by their baser instincts and their closeness to one another.

Based on the conflicting accounts of those who survived this astonishing saga, the director's grimy, edgy affair – which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival – is part biblical warning, part Lord of the Flies Nightmare. Never boring, but only occasionally surprising, it is another solid genre work from the director with an all-star cast.

In the winter of 1932, Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney) and his son from his first marriage, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), arrive on the Galapagos island of Floreana. There they want to live alongside Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore (Vanessa Kirby) and be guided by them and their teachings. They had settled on these inhospitable rocks in the middle of the ocean out of rejection of their homeland Germany and its increasingly fascist society.

At home, Friedrich has become a media sensation because of the courageous path he has chosen to take. He is driven by his work on a manifesto that expresses his philosophy for a new world order. Friedrich believes that the meaning of life is pain because: “In pain we find the truth. And in truth, salvation.” He and Dore practice what they preach. Friedrich has had all his teeth pulled to avoid infection, and Dore struggles with multiple sclerosis.

Friedrich and Dore have settled on Floreana to find out how to reshape civilization. They are not very receptive to Heinz and his clan. They send them to desolate caves on mountainsides next to one of two pitiful water sources. Although they assume that this will quickly deal with the invaders, this is not the case, for Heinz is a hardworking, true believer who has set out to change the landscape and, with it, his own destiny.

Margret is initially horrified by her new reality. With little choice, she decides to help her husband gather supplies, build their house, and tend to the garden. Against all odds – including wild dogs that decimate their canned goods – they soon live in relative comfort, with edible crops and a penned-in cow that provides milk.

“What did you expect – paradise?” jokes the ship's captain, who drops them off on Floreana beach, but Heinz and Margret tame their surroundings better than anyone could have imagined. And they do so largely without the help of Friedrich, who becomes increasingly jealous of their successes. Before Friedrich and Heinz can develop anything like a real rivalry, more serious problems arise in the form of Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), who claims the title of “Baroness” and makes her grand entrance on the shoulders of her enamored engineer (Felix Kammerer) and her handsome bodyguard (Toby Wallace) as if she were the reincarnation of Cleopatra.

Eloise frolics in the water with her two toy boys, stirring up resentment among one of them. She wants to build a grand hotel on the beach, which she will call “Hacienda Paradiso”. As she assumes that the current inhabitants of the island will be a thorn in her side, she begins to play Friedrich and Heinz off against each other.

Eloise is the snake in Edens figurative garden, and her behavior is the catalyst for the disaster that follows. She carelessly raids her canned goods supplies and has her underlings ransack Heinz's house at the precise moment his wife, alone and pregnant, is in labor. Margret's birth while threatened by wild dogs, culminating in her growling at her canine attackers with animalistic ferocity, is equal parts harrowing and silly. It's the film's best sequence, mostly because it seems so wacky and primal.

But despite the exaggeration, Howard keeps his material from drifting into the silly. De Armas is deliberately cheesy in her role as dragon con artist Eloise, using her sexuality as both bait and weapon. Her flamboyant sexiness gives the action the momentum it needs and harmonizes well with Friedrich's fanatically punitive lifestyle and Heinz and Margret's strict persistence.

The nominal protagonist of this story is Sweeney's Margret, but the actress is never entirely convincing as a shabby and serious young mother; despite her modest dress and speech, her eyes have a fiery gleam that is only appropriate at the end of the story.

Law and Kirby, on the other hand, exude a zeal and bitterness—towards their neighbours and each other—that is appropriately dirty and abrasive. Their dynamic becomes more charged as rations become dangerously low and Eloise hatches devious plans to sow discord. When Friedrich madly hammers away at the same typewriter key like a shirtless island version of Jack Nicholson's The Shining – The Wonderful World of Madness For at least some of these daring people, like many fathers, downfall has become an inevitability.

Howard builds the threat gradually through sidelong glances, snarky remarks, testy confrontations and snapshots of hawks catching prey with their talons and crabs crawling over skeletons. Mathias Herndl's sun-baked camerawork paints Floreana as an outpost of rough sand, sharp rock and tough soil, whose desolation is at once breathtaking and intimidating.

Eden doesn't overstretch its Old Testament undertones and wisely distributes its condemnation. The film is essentially a portrait of the inevitable divisions that arise when strangers are asked to live together, and in that respect it is a scathing indictment of Friedrich's ideas, which ultimately turn out to be sub-Nietzschean. Ideas that are based on the unnecessary chaos he has caused for himself and his countrymen, and by which he also justifies them.

Eden is not adventurous enough to generate much suspense, and it never quite resolves the tension between the foolish decisions of its characters and the quasi-homage to Margret at the end. Nevertheless, its straightforward approach – with convincing production and set design – makes it consistently captivating.

The film also benefits from Law and de Armas's formidable all-star cast. It harnesses Friedrich's passion and charisma, which make his ambitious plans so compelling, and it's a whirlwind of sex, cunning and shady villainy. Thanks to them, the film is a compelling story about individual dreams and manias, communal friction and failings, and the fact that sometimes hell really is other people.