Inside ‘Eden,’ a Star-Studded Fight for Survival: Ana de Armas, Jude Law, and More on Their Wild New Thriller

There’s a scene in Eden, Ron Howard’s wacky survival film premiering Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival, in which Sydney Sweeney gives birth in a remote cave surrounded by wild dogs. It’s the early 1930s and Sweeney’s Margret Wittmer, a German housewife who’s relocated with her husband to the uninhabited Galápagos island of Floreana, cannot find a single soul around her when her water breaks. On the days that Sweeney shot the scene, the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. The performance verges on feral. “She got it,” Howard says. “It was raw and she was all in, just like her character had to have been at that moment.”

The strangest part of all of this? The scene, like the film as a whole, is based rather precisely on actual events. Eden was shot in Queensland, Australia, but Howard spent weeks traveling around the Galápagos for research. He found the actual place where this birth took place: “You look at the cave and you can’t imagine anyone endured this, but it happened.”

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Viewers might be forgiven for assuming that Eden, written by Emmy nominee Noah Pink (Genius), is a work of fiction. Its characters are outrageous; its story is bizarre, start to finish. But Howard has been compelled by the tale of Floreana’s settlers since he first heard it 15 years ago on a family vacation. After exhaustively researching and examining contradictory accounts, he figured out how to make a movie about it. “You’d be shocked at how accurate the movie actually is,” he says. “What was chilling about this story is that a handful of people went there and half of them either died or vanished—and that’s intense. That’s like a season of Survivor where people really don’t make it.”

The story begins with Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his wife, Dora (Vanessa Kirby), living in total isolation, having built their own home and tending to their own garden and animals in an Emerson-esque self-reliance utopia. A German philosopher obsessed with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dr. Ritter is ostensibly working on a manual for a new way of living, embracing his status as King of Floreana, as covered extensively by the international press. But the fantasy is punctured by the arrival of Margret, her wide-eyed husband, Heinz (Daniel Brühl), and their young son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel). As the two units learn to coexist, along comes another group, led by a self-proclaimed heiress known as The Baroness (Ana de Armas), with two seemingly obedient hunks (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace) by her side and available at her every whim. So begins a power struggle for control of the island.

“When you meet [these characters], they’re offbeat, even eccentric, kind of funny—you don’t know what they’re going to do next,” Howard says. “They’re certainly unpredictable. And yet, as that pressure test intensifies, they actually become dangerous. You really do wonder who’s going to prevail as they strive to try to redefine themselves in this place.”

“Society comes with you,” Howard continues, “because society is about human beings.”

Howard has worked consistently with larger film studios over decades, but to relatively mixed results lately. His most recent film, Thirteen Lives, was a superbly executed ticking-clock thriller developed under MGM, but a planned theatrical release was scrapped after Amazon bought the company and took the movie straight to streaming. (“I think it was shameful what [Amazon] did,” the movie’s star Viggo Mortensen recently told me.) Before that, Howard helmed the poorly reviewed JD Vance 2020 biopic Hillbilly Elegy for Netflix—a project that has earned enduring backlash, with its subject now Donald Trump’s controversial running mate. Vance’s prominence has actually boosted Hillbilly Elegy, which depicts the VP candidate in positive terms, back onto Netflix’s most-watched charts.

“Look, I don’t want to say a lot about it—the film is what it is, made [five] years ago—but I will say I am surprised and disappointed by the rhetoric that I’m hearing,” Howard says of the VP candidate. “We have to do our job as citizens and really think about it and go out and vote. It’s not about some movie maybe five or six years ago, it’s about what’s happening today. Go out and vote. Participate.”

In any case, Eden’s timing couldn’t be better for a kind of reset for Howard. He made the movie independently (it’s headed to Toronto seeking distribution). “We were on a really tight budget and schedule on a movie that had no cover sets—we built all of our sets on location,” he says. “Our only cover was to shoot real fucking fast when we had the good weather.” That energy shows in the movie. It’s a risky, unusual curiosity, and you can feel Howard having fun not just in the world—Eden really was filmed in the jungle—but with tone. He’s long been drawn to themes of survival and triumph, but rarely has he laced them with a loose playfulness that borders on camp.

A long line of Oscar- and Golden Globe–nominated stars eagerly jumped into the pot too. “I got a little scared, and I told [Ron] I was nervous because it was really out there,” de Armas tells me. “He was very supportive and excited. There was no question I wanted to do it. I wanted the challenge.” The Blonde star serves here as the agent of chaos in an already messy stew. Working off of everything she could find, from an old documentary to photographs taken during the ’30s on the island, de Armas created her own unhinged version of a woman who arrived on Floreana determined to make it hers. “Having this crazy threesome relationship, and being a woman of opposites—either she’s sweet and tender and fragile and nervous and scared, or she’s absolutely crazy and dangerous,” de Armas says. “It was kind of finding that limit: What was the craziest I could get? How far could I go?”

“I’m so impressed with her creative courage. She’s a risk-taker as an artist,” Howard says of de Armas. “And I knew that it was going to take that kind of individual.”

The Baroness’s main adversary is Law’s Dr. Ritter—the man whose Eden she’s come to not only disrupt, but transform, with plans to build a hotel empire. Law read the philosophers who’d been of interest to his character, and adjusted his physicality around Ritter’s strict rules for living off the grid. “Quite honestly, that’s something that I’ve always felt an appeal to myself,” he says. “I did a lot of my prep for this during the [actors] strike, and my family is based at my house in France, which is very rural. So every day, whether it was building new walls or digging out foundations or clearing up the garden or whatever it might have been, I felt a little closer to Ritter.”

Howard actually had to push back on both Law and Kirby’s commitment to Method, Floreana-style living. “They kept wanting to live in their [characters’] house there, and they were so upset with us that we just kept saying, ‘No, we’re here all day, but you just can’t do that because there are critters that are going to want to join you,’” Howard says.

While they weren’t in the Galápagos, the cast was still shooting in the elements. “It was rough,” de Armas says with a weary laugh. “It was a long shoot. We had a lot to do. There was no time for breaks. There was nothing luxurious about the shoot or the set or the environment.”

The production team had to scout locations for poisonous snakes—and “found them every day in our locations, with all the actors barefoot out here running around,” Howard says. You feel that danger in the film, not just as the stakes are raised, but through the increasing wildness of the acting.

Law, for his part, embraced the task. “I’ve never been one to feel uncomfortable in that environment—I’ve always enjoyed living outdoors,” he says.

He and the rest of the cast had the chance to do just that—and for quite some time. Several scenes took days to get right, including a spectacularly disastrous dinner gathering. It finds de Armas’s Baroness hosting and holding court, trying to negotiate terms for the way everyone can live in harmony—while slyly asserting her power in the new dynamics. The sequence involves violence, singing, and some creative food play. “That scene was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” de Armas says. “It was kind of like a chess game. We spent three days shooting that.”

It’s but one key scene in which we see Dora, Margret, and The Baroness all watching closely. How they navigate one another informs Eden’s bloody climax. The movie is driven mainly by accounts from the real women who briefly conquered Floreana, and they were Howard’s guiding light. “Audiences can relate to somebody making that kind of desperate attempt to just leave it behind and create a better life for themselves,” he says. “But so many decades ago, to have three women defining themselves through this kind of gauntlet, taking charge and asserting themselves in really powerful ways—whether diabolical or noble or tragic—that was something that was even more rare.”

Though “rare” may be an understatement when it comes to Eden. This historical mystery isn’t suddenly solved with this film, exactly, but its singularity—its brutality, its tragedy, and above all its sheer weirdness—likely won’t be forgotten.

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