The films of Ron Howard – usually polite, Oscar-aiming true stories such as A Beautiful Mind or Apollo 13 or solidly made, anonymous IP blockbusters such as The Grinch or The Da Vinci Code – have not shown the director to be someone greatly interested in exploring or even showing much awareness of real, down-to-the-core darkness. His All-American persona, as a well-meaning aw shucks nice guy (who now claims shock upon hearing the subject of his 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy might actually not be such an inspiring figure after all) would not make him seem like the perfect match for a nasty and violent tale of the horrors we’re willing to inflict upon each other to get what we want.
For a while, taking charge of fact-based 1930s-set survival thriller Eden, he almost convinces us that maybe he’s the madman for the job, tightly steering us through a fun, frightening descent into hell. But the more his characters engage in very bad things, the more it becomes clear that perhaps Howard was indeed a very bad fit, the film drowning in the deep end.
