Eden is luridly entertaining, Goodbye June a middling melodrama

Eden (M18)

130 minutes, opens on Jan 8
★★★☆☆

The story: In the early 1930s post-World War I, eight Europeans in search of a new start settle on an uninhabited island in Ecuador’s Galapagos Archipelago and descend into madness and violence. Within six years, half the colony would be either missing or dead in a shocking unsolved mystery.

Hollywood director Ron Howard earned Academy Award notices for memorialising the lunar mission of Apollo 13 (1995) and a mathematical genius in A Beautiful Mind (2001).

There is nothing heroic in his latest true story, based on two survivors’ conflicting accounts of the Galapagos Affair.

Jude Law stars in Eden as German physician-philosopher Friedrich Ritter, the pioneer along with his ailing lover Dore (Vanessa Kirby). A pompous hypocrite, he renounces humanity, yet sends his manifestos to the continent for publication.

His celebrity attracts the arrival of an earnest couple, Heinz (Daniel Bruhl) and Margret Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney), and their son (Jonathan Tittel). He resents the intrusion. And then a self-styled baroness (Ana de Armas) slithers ashore, a cunning black-hearted viper in their illusory Eden.

A deadly power struggle breaks out over the depleting resources and the camps’ competing utopian ideologies: solitude for Friedrich, family for the Wittmers, and noisy all-hours sex with her pair of boy toys (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace) for the baroness, who has delusions of building a luxury resort.

The characters are varying degrees of unlikeable in a sensationalistic, borderline campy parable on civilisation’s collapse.

But it is irresistible, watching the members of the starry ensemble destroy one another in a tropical climate sticky with insects, exaggerated accents, mistrust and greed.

Law goes full-frontal, and Sweeney’s hausfrau Margret goes into labour while attacked by a pack of wild dogs.

Hot take: The Survivor reality series has never been so luridly entertaining.

Goodbye June (M18)

116 minutes, available on Netflix
★★☆☆☆

The story: British actress Kate Winslet produces and turns director with a holiday weepie about a quartet of squabbling adult siblings brought together by a domestic crisis.

Goodbye June was written by Winslet’s 22-year-old son Joe Anders. Her directing debut is a family affair both behind the camera and on-screen, where the Oscar-winning star has cast herself as the capable middle daughter, a busy working mum with AirPods in her ears.

Andrea Riseborough plays her jealous estranged younger sister, a high-strung homemaker who eats organic.

Toni Collette gets the kooky role of the New Ager eldest sister spreading her “healing energy”. There is also a sensitive younger brother (Johnny Flynn).

Starring as the eponymous matriarch is Helen Mirren, and her four children have converged in her London hospital room over the two weeks before Christmas for her dying days. June’s cancer has metastasised, setting off among them a tempest of anguish, acrimony, age-old tensions and grief.

Viewers may, meanwhile, be mourning instead the collection of top-tier actors in such treacle.

Winslet has a steady directorial hand, and English national treasure Timothy Spall is tragicomic as the incompetent father numbing his feelings at the neighbourhood pub.

The characters are, nevertheless, broad types, even Mirren’s suffering yet stoic mother, and none more so than the angelic nurse named Angel (Fisayo Akinade).

Dispensing morphine and knowing smiles, he becomes June’s co-conspirator in a ploy to reconcile her dysfunctional clan.

That is June’s parting gift. And, sure enough, there will be comforting hugs in a sincere but shallow tearjerker on how the shared loss of a loved one can unite and heal.

Hot take: The sterling ensemble renders watchable a middling melodrama that is far beneath what its members are capable of.