As the site's Chief Film Critic, he has authored hundreds of reviews and covered major film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. Stock photos, 360 images, vectors and videos. After all, this is a film where a grotesque patriarch is named Son. 10:22pm Paradise Hills has cult-film potential, but it doesnt seem destined for a major release, and it appears to still be looking for distribution. But this being a sci-fi movie, things are much more nefarious below the surface. She awakens two weeks later and meets with the Duchess, who runs the Paradise program. Paradises idyllic seaside settingall pinks, whites, and goldsis lush with flower gardens, mossy stone steps, overlapping Roman arches, and gauzy curtains that billow in a controlled breeze. Here, Waddington introduces the concept of duplicity, the kind that isnt far off from personal curation of ones Instagram self. Emma Roberts' Uma is sent there when she refuses to marry the sadistic businessman responsible for her father's bankruptcy and suicide. Dainty glass teacups and puffy dresses compose Waddingtons mise-en-scne, but Paradise Hills builds towards a dark, labyrinthine series of twists. Although Uma is weary of attempts to brainwash her, she reluctantly gives the treatment a shot while befriending fellow patients Chloe (Danielle Macdonald), Yu (Awkwafina), and Amarna (Eiza Gonzlez), although Uma is the only one on the island who isnt there voluntarily. The strange world girls and young women find themselves is ripe for exploring through sci-fi. On the other, they're expected to be chaste, and to hand over their sexuality to the men in power. 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Though Uma has been cast aside because of her choice of mate, Paradise Hills throws in a growing attraction to someone else (even after Markus, implausibly enough, appears on the scene) that detracts from her central storyline, one that appears to be shoehorned in just to give another character literallyanything to do. The Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal on season 3, Neighbours announces seven more returning cast. Covering the hottest movie and TV topics that fans want. Thats where the girls are forced to observe, from said horse, amusingly off-kilter videos meant to brainwash them;Uma is subjected to a claustrophobic presentation featuring dim bulb Son, punctuated by deranged vignettes in which he tries to prove his sensitivity by thrusting forward flowers and his strength by doing pushups on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Uma, who wears blue lipstick, a glitzy gown, and a spherical beaded net over her face, looks like a zombified citizen from the Capitol in The Hunger Games. So says The Duchess, the flamboyant headmistress (played by Milla Jovovich doing her best "June Cleaver dressed as Effie Trinket") of the mysterious Paradise Hills, a school for the "not like other girls . Paradise Hills may be directed at a younger audience but this is not a coddling film, because were shown a hopeless, entangled, unsolvable world that its protagonist must now navigate alone. In interviews, Waddington has mentioned that their films target audience is young women and girls who have been drawn to genre but have had to exercise imagination to see themselves represented within it. No amount of stylish production values and costumes can make up for that. Uma soon realizes that lurking behind all this beauty is a sinister secret. A first feature film by director Alice Waddington, Paradise Falls is an impressive entrance into the world of genre film. Share November 12, 2019 https://chrp.at/3bIw Share on Facebook Tweet This! Its a lot to take in, and Paradise Hills isnt up to the task beyond presenting concepts, gussying them up with florid accoutrements, and hoping its all dazzling enough to obscure how thin the entire endeavor is. Are people obsessed with how things look? [11], Paradise Hills had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 26 January 2019. Though viewers aren't given an explicit timeline or explanation of the events leading up to the baroque "Brave New World" in which the narrative is set, the patients of "Paradise Hills" are all from the wealthy 1% who came out on top following a series of alluded-to wars (aka, the Uppers). Again and again, Waddington's film tells viewers (in particular, with its continued references to roses having thorns) that there's a dangerous trade-off involved in living the high life as a woman. Two months earlier, she didnt. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Site developed by Love Has No Logic Design Group And while Paradise Hills isnt epic or multilayered enough to stand alongside the works that inspired it, it isnt dragged down by elaborate or self-serious world-building, either. In November 2017, Emma Roberts and Danielle Macdonald joined the cast of the film, with Alice Waddington directing from a screenplay by Nacho Vigalondo and Brian DeLeeuw, with Adrin Guerra and Nria Valls producing under their Nostromo Pictures banner. Lush, anachronism-laden science fantasy. Visit CHIRP Radio on Facebook The sci-fi, starring Emma Roberts, Awkwafina and Milla Jovovich, premiered at Sundance in 2019 and received a limited release later in the year in the US, but its Netflix debut brings the movie to UK audiences for the first time. What is understood is that the beginning is actually the end, and we flash back two months prior: Uma waking up disheveled and dirt-ridden, slowly realizing she has been sent to a secluded compound called--you guessed it--Paradise Hills. The evil Duchess became confused and couldn't figure out which Uma was real, and the distraction was enough to allow the real Uma to take out her scalpel and slash the Duchess' throat, killing her instantly. As fairytale-like as the French literary and military invention of chivalry might appear in everything from Arthurian literature to Disney movies, it belies a mythology about the roles and "definitions" of men and women that helped justify the oppression of the latter one of Waddington's focal points right up until the 21st century. For the better part of the narrative, viewers are rooting for the heartbroken and fatherless (yet nonetheless privileged) Uma to lead her roommates to freedom. "Paradise Hills" spends much time simply watching these young women gambol about their environment in outfits assembled largely from white chiffon and ruffles, with discreet kink-fetish. A golden ballroom is the setting of the palatial wedding reception for Uma (Emma Roberts) and Son (Arnaud Valois). / Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we've tested sent to your inbox daily. Uma (Roberts) is the latest arrival, sent there to become the ideal wife for Son (Arnaud Valois). Like many young adult sci-fi stories, though, Paradise Hills offers a space where young womens competence and autonomy is taken for granted even if the antagonists are determined to take it away. Unfortunately, Paradise Hills is exactly that: pretty on the outside, but not much depth on the inside. In her feature film directorial debut, "Paradise Hills," Alice Waddington constructs a simultaneously ornate and seductive yet deeply unsettling futuristic world in which anachronisms in. It's at Paradise Hills where she quickly falls into friendship with Chloe (Dumplin's Danielle Macdonald), a southern belle whose full-figured profile is an eye sore to her pageant-centric mother, and Yu (Awkwafina), a headphone-wearing outsider who suffers from panic attacks. As Paradise Hills lurches through its third act, it goes off the rails completely, trading twists for anything remotely coherent. (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)/*