Director:Gurutej Shetty

Cast:Kiran Raj, Radhya R, Sameeksha, Ravi Shankar, Yash Shetty, Apurva

Published 14 September 2024, 04:31 IST

It would be completely understandable that Ron Howard, having directed more than two dozen genre-tripping films spanning six decades, would want to shake things up a bit by jumping into something outside his proven comfort zone.

And it would be equally logical that the vehicle to take him there would be a certifiably bizarre but true account of a 1920s German philosopher who sets up an experimental society with his lover/disciple on a remote island in the Galápagos, only to have it all implode when opportunists come and crash the party.

But despite all the intriguing possibilities of the concept and a game, international cast including Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney, Eden, handed its world premiere at Toronto, never finds its happy place. The prevailing overwrought tone lands more cartoonish than satirical, while a protracted running time accentuates the film’s deficiencies.

The movie certainly starts promisingly enough, efficiently setting up the life and times of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Law). In 1929, he flees German society and its bourgeois values to create a new home on the remote island of Floreana, living off of limited natural resources with his survivalist partner, Dore Strauch (Kirby).

But the couple’s solitary existence is interrupted by the arrival of Heinz Wittmer (Brühl), a World War I vet with a younger new wife, Margaret (Sweeney), and a son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel). They have been following Ritter’s dispatches and hope the land’s virgin air might cure Harry’s tuberculosis, just as it appears to have kept Strauch’s multiple sclerosis under control.

Feeling less than hospitable, Ritter and Strauch glare at the newbies with their safari shorts and butterfly nets, figuring they won’t make it until the first rains.

But while the family prove surprisingly resilient, building a home for themselves and their soon-to-be newborn, their co-existence is freshly threatened by the entrance of the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (de Armas), accompanied by a pocket harem of young men, who intends to build the world’s most exclusive resort on the rocky terrain.

It soon becomes clear that the Baroness, with her long strand of pearls and a hard-to-place accent that sounds much like Anna Delvey’s, is a scheming instigator. She proceeds to pit the inhabitants against each other, leading to an inevitable descent into madness.

Despite an inspired setup that might suggest Werner Herzog’s Gilligan’s Island, Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink (Tetris) shipwreck the Queensland-shot vehicle in a mishmash of styles. Neither quite satire nor thriller nor murder mystery, the film cries out for a sharper attack.

It’s the kind of tale that would have been a natural fit for the likes of Mike White, whose acutely devious White Lotus sensibility would have been right at home here. But although Howard delivers some effective set pieces, notably a harrowing sequence in which Margaret must deliver her own baby, little about Eden feels consistent.

As a result, the performances are likewise hit and miss. De Armas does the best she can with her femme fatale role, even though she ultimately lacks the satirical chops of a more seasoned character actress to really hit it home.

Meanwhile, Law (so commanding in another TIFF offering, The Order) grows so tiresome as the smug, pontificating Dr. Ritter that by the time he eventually loses his mind, you can’t blame it for wanting to get away.

Only Sweeney manages to retain the viewer’s sympathy and her character’s sanity as the decent pillar of stability that is Margaret — who, as the end credits and archival footage reveal, would remain on the island until her death in 2000, and where her descendants host tourists at Wittmer Lodge to this day.

Now that premise sounds more like something in Howard’s wheelhouse.

As Lana Wilson’s documentary about psychics “Look Into My Eyes” opens, a gray New York sky hovers above a nondescript building. A modest yellow glow comes from one high-storied window. Inside, a woman begins telling someone off-camera about a girl’s tragic death, something she’s held onto tightly for 20 years. There’s a question she still needs answered. How is she?

Wilson returns to that exterior building shot at the end of the film, after we’ve witnessed several more interactions and gotten to know a handful of these psychics, many of whom carry around their own unresolved aches. But at the end, the image somehow feels different: That lit window against the big, hard, anxious city conveys a hopeful warmth. It looks comforting.

Coming to “Look Into My Eyes” as a skeptic is only natural, because you’re human. The world of clairvoyants is bizarre and suspicious, and we love docs that pull back the curtain. What’s also universal, however, in these years of global trauma, is the need to address what ails us, and it’s this perspective that informs Wilson’s approach — the same one that imbued grace to her previous documentaries “After Tiller,” about abortion doctors, and “The Departure,” about a turmoil-ridden monk.

Something diverting and affecting emerges from Wilson’s close, considerate and not unskeptical hang with a diverse handful of New York psychics plying their wares and living their lives. You end up believing — not in paranormal powers or some mystical gift, but in the modest building blocks of reaching out. These tucked-away transactions of faith and performance offer, in their own way, a kind of solace.

Wilson’s observational mode is respectful, the multi-camera set-up fixed on hushed, awkward-at-first exchanges as if capturing an important interview where subject and questioner have equal standing. The faces of the clients have nervous smiles as they ask a question or await one, or receive a declaration of a spiritual presence. The psychics, too, betray their own apprehension as things come to them. Will it spark an emotion, bring them nearer to the source of the pain? Or will it go wrong? It comes off as a first dance, where both parties want to avoid stepping on toes or actively leading, yet find a rhythm that matches the music and, most importantly, feels good.

The exchanges often seem like bids for being heard, where all that’s being sought is a kind, sensible word from the friendly face in front of you. An adoptee wants details about the Chinese birth parents who gave her up. (They were greedy; being adopted can be hard.) A tightly wound woman fears her defiant dog doesn’t like her. (He senses that worry; be calmer.) A young Black man fixates on having learned about his ancestor’s slave price. (Focus on defining your own freedom.)

That assuaging goes both ways, though. The psychics’ own backstories of anguish and loneliness — unsurprisingly, they’re almost all former or still-striving actors — invariably tinge the kind of healing messages given: that a person is unique, that someone can’t change the past, that a lost loved one accepts them, that recognition is just around the corner. Some of the psychics’ lives seem, frankly, precarious, and by a certain point, we glean, quite movingly, that in these sessions, they’re soothing themselves as much as their clients.

In interviews, Wilson can be heard off-camera, gently probing: Is this essentially improv? Their replies aren’t defensive — the psychics rely on an affable confidence in not knowing exactly what is going on, but that something is. As one of them adds, “If it resonates, it doesn’t really matter.”

Human connections are gifts, imagination is powerful and empathy isn’t a trick. These are the things “Look Into My Eyes” patiently communicates to us from its watchful perch. What these freelance healers do may not be professional therapy. But the sensitive, intimate outlet shown in Wilson’s compassionate documentary — one of the year’s best — lets us put our mistrust aside to consider what can be deeply felt from a pretense accepted between willing, receptive souls.