Stranded with characters who become more unsympathetic by the minute

Ron Howard has always prided himself on being a versatile filmmaker – over the past 40 years he's made films about mermaids, cocoons, car factories, astronauts, firefighters, newspapers, beautiful spirits, cave rescuers, the Grinch, the Da Vinci Code, the Beatles and Pavarotti. But at the premiere of his latest film, Eden, at the Toronto Film Festival, he declared that this film stands out more from his other work than anything he's ever made. He's right, although not for the reason he thinks.

Eden, based on events that took place 100 years ago on one of the Galápagos Islands, is a difficult film to characterize. It is billed as a “thriller,” but I would describe it as a misanthropic survival comedy that combines Robinson Crusoe with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and mad footnotes from Friedrich Nietzsche. For Howard, the film is certainly different (It's about sex, murder and animal slaughter.) But there's another word for it – the word is terrible. There's no denying that Howard has made the ultimate film that's out of his league, but what's special about it isn't the eccentric subject matter. It's that Howard is so immersed in the subject matter, so obsessed with it, so lost in it, that he's forgotten to do what he can normally do in his sleep: tell a coherent story.

From the beginning, we are haunted by the question: if the characters are historically based and “real,” why do they seem so exaggerated and artificial? Jude Law, who gave perhaps the best performance of his career as an FBI agent in The Order, descends into Teutonic sullenness here as Friedrich Ritter, a German doctor who has turned his back on society for the remote green island of Floreana in the southern part of Ecuador's Galápagos archipelago. The year is 1929, and although the debacle of World War I is long over, the world has experienced economic collapse. Ritter believes that the old order will be utterly destroyed and that a new utopia may be built on it. And he, by God, will be the one to create that utopia!

He is working with messianic fury on a manifesto, sitting at his typewriter all day and hammering away at it (Click, click, click!), who takes dark inspiration from Nietzsche. Ritter tries to imagine a new future, but he seems to have already given up the ghost of it. His exhortations are driven by cynical bluster, a loss of faith in humanity; that seems to be the real reason he left Germany to live as a tropical recluse. He has his wife Dora (Vanessa Kirby) with him, and together they live a life like a debauched Adam and Eve. She is there to support his grand vision, but the two bicker more than they fornicate, and watching them gives us the feeling that the Ritters are on a crusade that seems doomed to failure because he is insane. Friedrich is no Nietzsche. He comes across more like a perverted 1960s monomaniac who has taken too many drugs.

So what's at stake? That's what Howard and his screenwriter Noah Pink never figured out. Early on, another couple shows up, and they're the opposite of the Ritters. Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his wife Margaret (Sydney Sweeney) have come to Floreana because they've followed the Ritters' reports and want to join their movement. They've brought their son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) because he has tuberculosis and they couldn't afford to put him in a sanitarium; maybe the island air will cure him. You'd think a communal theorist like Ritter would welcome these disciples, but no—he just wants them gone. He puts them up in the nearby stone grotto and explains how hard it is to even get fresh water on the island. He doesn't exactly roll out the welcome bush, and it's not as if there's any dramatic connection between the two couples. The interactions are downbeat and sullen.

Howard has said that he based Eden on two contradictory accounts of the events it describes, and that is how it comes across: a film that never finds a point of reference for identification. We are kept at a distance, observing the characters as if they were part of an insect colony. We also get to see plenty of wild animals: crabs, wild boars, a Jude Law in full frontal view.

Then a mysterious figure appears – another island visitor, but one with very different intentions. Ana de Armas, the charismatic actress from “Knives Out” and “Blonde,” plays Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn, aka the Baroness, a party girl fatale who arrives with a horde of men intent on building a luxury hotel on the island. Is she serious? Is she really a Baroness? De Armas plays her with a mature, amoral smile and an accent that makes her sound like Madeline Kahn in “Young Frankenstein.” She acts like she's in a '30s drawing room comedy, which is pretty absurd, but for a while you can feel the film come alive when she's on screen. The rest of the time it sinks further into its sluggish morass of bad vibes (and even de Armas' arrogance begins to crumble).

“Eden” plods along, without energy or purpose, but with a lot of arbitrary showmanship. Sydney Sweeney takes the prize for the film's most radiant sense. Her Margaret is modest and likable, and even though she has to endure a birth scene that is almost meant to make us shudder, you feel something for her.

But as relationships slowly unravel and the film turns into a strangely demented version of Lord of the Flies, we're not sure how to take in what we're seeing. Howard should have tried harder to make sure the audience has an interest in these people from the start. He seems to assume we'll just go along with it. But I can't imagine Eden finding a large audience, a film that makes you want to leave this island and return to a place where people are sane.