Ron Howard has finally lost his mind

Ron Howard's reputation as a Hollywood star who created classic hits and mediocre prestige films always obscured where his true skills lay – his ability to take larger-than-life characters and pit them against each other. That's why some of his films (The missing, The dilemma, Frost/Nixon, Night shifteven those silly Dan Brown adaptations) are basically buddy films, sometimes even secretly. That is also why he adapted true stories so often (Apollo13, Cinderella-Man, Thirteen lives, [sigh] Hillbilly Elegy). Reality, or at least the appearance of reality, served as a cover for his penchant for extreme personalities. As did his solid, polished approach to the craft: building compelling, well-proportioned narratives around people who threatened to take the stories in all sorts of crazy directions. He has done the same with his new film, Edentoo. But this time, to his credit, Howard lets the madness run wild. He has a deserted island in the Galapagos and five wild men and women trying to outdo each other, each played by an actor who is going all out.

The remarkable premise is actually based on a true story. (We even get the obligatory end credits shots of some of the real people, although this time they do not provoke Oh And ahhh so much as if it were a mystery to us whether all that we saw could ever have happened.) In 1929, when the world was suffering from financial and political chaos, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) moved to the uninhabited Galapagos island of Floreana, he to develop “a radical new philosophy that will save humanity from itself,” and she to provide moral support while she tried to cure her multiple sclerosis. They had bourgeois Society, but they also sought to promote themselves. They sent letters abroad, and imaginative articles in German newspapers praised Ritter's bold new experiment. And so Eden begins in 1932 with the arrival of Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), a veteran of the First World War, his wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney) and their son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) travel to Floreana in search of paradise and a new beginning. What they find is an uninhabitable wilderness with no fresh water, where wild boars hunt anything you want to grow and stray dogs lurk everywhere, ready to pounce on the weak.

They also discover that the embittered Ritter, for all his ambitions to make the world a better place and save humanity, really does hate people. He sends the unsuspecting Wittmers to a cave on a hill, hoping to drive them away. Or maybe he thinks fighting will cure them of their ailments. Ritter believes in suffering. “What is the true meaning of life?” he asks in his works. “Pain. In pain we find truth. And in truth, salvation.” In fact, he is turned on by the suffering of others. After witnessing the Wittmers' early struggles, Ritter and his wife hop into bed together, and Howard intercuts their lovemaking with Heinz Wittmer stumbling up a hill. We might wonder if all this suffering turns the director on, too.

One day, in the middle of this simmering stalemate on the edge of nowhere, Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) arrives on the island with two attractive lovers (Feliz Kammerer and Toby Wallace) and a plan to build a luxury hotel for millionaires. She wears elegant clothes, records, books and has no idea what she is doing. If Ritter is a masochist and a sadist, Eloise is a pure hedonist. She is also a narcissist and a neurotic. She pitches her tent right next to the Wittmers' house so that they can constantly hear her having wild sex with her toyboys. She keeps repeating to herself, “I am the embodiment of perfection,” as if to convince herself of it. We don't know her real story; even her accent seems fake. And Armas plays her with an electrifying unpredictability. We can never predict what Eloise will do next, whether she will show cruelty or compassion, whether she will seduce or attack. This uncertainty gives her an almost satanic power over those around her and also over the viewer.

Uncharacteristically, Howard embraces the messiness of these people and the contradictions of their lives. Eloise may soon find herself in a villainous role, and she's certainly manipulative and a little crazy, but she also inspires the Wittmers' sickly son to dream of freedom and a better life, as she probably once did herself. We see how vulnerable she is, which makes her both more compelling and more dangerous. Everyone else is on shaky ground, too. We hear Ritter's philosophical ramblings on the soundtrack, spoken in an almost stentorian voice-over—but we also realize that at least some of it is nonsense. Sometimes Ritter pauses, repeats and corrects himself, complains that what he's just said is too much like Nietzsche, then anxiously tries to think of something original. This man is not a visionary; he's just trying to make a name for himself. For all her outward support, his wife has obviously begun to doubt her beloved prophet. Kirby, who is always so good at slipping subtly from one emotional extreme to the other, remains alert and tense here – we always have the feeling that she could be capable of great violence.

Wittmer and his wife, who on the outside seem like the wide-eyed, mild-mannered audience surrogates caught in the middle of all this madness, also experience their own wild journeys. He is, after all, a man broken by war—that's the reason they came here in the first place. Margret is young and impressionable (Dore initially mistakenly calls her “a child bride”), but she is also pregnant, and watching her raw, snarling instincts take over as the film progresses is one of the Eden's great joys. Sweeney, who had already undergone the torture of the damned in Immaculate At the beginning of the year, she once again gets to play an innocent who discovers inner, almost mythical reserves for survival. She gets the most gruesome and intense scene in the film, which is better left unsaid at the moment.

The pressure of the untamed environment, combined with the inability of these characters to ever trust each other, results in an over-the-top melodrama that gets crazier as the story progresses. But it also draws us in. At the heart of Eden that consumes not only the people on the screen but also the audience; our own bloodlust is provoked, as if to prove that something corrupt lurks in the hearts of all people. In the past, when he approached something too dark and crazy, Howard tended to pull back. He has made some films, such as In the heart of the seathat had to be a little crazier to work. With Edenit seems he has finally allowed himself to lose his mind, and it might be the best decision he has made in years.