Utopia devolves into a habitat of inhumanity and deceit in 'Eden'

Ron Howard’s new film “Eden” is a true story about disenchanted Europeans, who, in the 1930s, escaped from their society and decamped on a lonely rock in the Galapagos, only to see their handmade utopia devolve into petty power struggles and murder.

- ROBERT ABELE

JUDE LAW and Vanessa Kirby in the Ron Howard-directed "Eden," which is based on a real-life experiment in the 1930s on a remote island in the Galapagos.

It’s also lurid proof that Charles Darwin missed out on the truly juicy survival-of-the-fittest action by about a hundred years.

This is certainly unusual material for a mainstream stalwart like Howard, who knows his way around heroic problem-solving narratives (“Apollo 13,” the Thai cave rescue movie “Thirteen Lives”). But in screenwriter Noah Pink’s melodramatic imagining of incidents both well-documented and mysterious, one can see this Hollywood veteran on a mission to loosen the shackles of his reputation and have some nasty, brutish fun. To wit: A perma-sneering Jude Law greets intruders naked; a wild-eyed Ana de Armas insults and tries to seduce everyone; Vanessa Kirby lets foreplay include the pulling of her diseased tooth; Sydney Sweeney gives birth alone while growling at a pack of wild dogs.