Review: Paradise Hills Is a Series of Themes in Search of a Compelling Story

Alice Waddington’s feature-length debut, Paradise Hills, centers around an island retreat where uncooperative women are sent in order to be “fixed.” At this brainwashing facility, which suggests a combination of a psych ward and rehab clinic, the patients are given mandatory makeovers (all of them must wear frilly white dresses) and taught how to behave by the enigmatic Duchess (Milla Jovovich). Male attendants observe their every move, sternly calling the women “mademoiselle,” as in “mademoiselle, please finish your meal.” Waddington’s sci-fi fantasy realizes a beautiful world of strange, intricate designs and candy colors, but it never finds a cohesive story wrapper for its themes.

Uma’s (Emma Roberts) internment on the island is meant to curb her refusal to marry a rich suitor because another, poorer man (he’s a “lower,” where Uma is an “upper”) has captured her heart. When her initial escape attempts are thwarted, she resigns herself to the island’s banal rituals alongside the other twentysomething “problem women,” putting on makeup or therapeutically speaking to a mirror. Chloe’s (Danielle MacDonald) stay is supposed to make her thin, Yu’s (Awkwafina) is supposed to quell her panic attacks, and Amarna’s (Eiza González), like Uma’s, is meant to make her happy with a man she has no interest in.

Paradise Hills is very bluntly about how society conditions women into silence and docile conformity, and that bluntness fits the heightened atmosphere of this odd, picturesque island with a sordid underbelly. The facility’s design is intriguingly gaudy, awash in mirrors, flowing curtains, nature paintings, and plants draped over every surface. The patients are drugged into submission after consuming dainty little meals, and they watch videos while strapped to a carousel horse, which suggests a Disney-princess version of the chair where Malcolm McDowell’s Alex is restrained in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

But despite how clearly something is “off” about this island facility, the film struggles to develop any sense of its underlying darkness. There’s little menace beyond Jovovich’s impressive turn as the Duchess, who she portrays with a dead-eyed, passive-aggressive pleasantness, like a therapist not entirely concealing dislike of her patients. So much of Paradise Hills is devoted to the imprisoned characters growing closer to one another and showing solidarity against their attendants and the Duchess, yet they all settle into their roles as a united force a little too easily, as though they’re involved in a plot-mandated alliance rather than a genuine series of relationships. It feels as if the film’s themes were conceived first, with the barest shred of story and dialogue used to tenuously tie them together. Those things make for a pretty bow, but it all comes apart with even a gentle pull.