Paradise Hills is a gorgeous, confusing science fantasy

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Sometimes, the Sundance Film Festival is where you’ll see the films that will help define the coming year in entertainment. Sometimes, it’s where you’ll find oddball projects like Paradise Hills: a beautiful, bizarre science fiction fairy tale about a group of young women who are sent to an oppressive reform school on a mysterious island.

Paradise Hills, the debut feature film from Spanish director Alice Waddington, is much stronger on style than it is on plot or character development. But its creepy premise and unique imagery make it light, clever, and engaging.

This review contains minor spoilers for the plot of Paradise Hills.

Lush, anachronism-laden science fantasy. Paradise Hills is set in a world of hyper-stratified class divisions, flying Art Deco cars, hologram jewelry, and fashion that blends gauzy Victorian ruffles with neon hair and makeup. The film both critiques and revels in an aggressively feminine high-tech aesthetic that’s tinged with eerie surrealism. (Think: The Prisoner filtered through a Poppy video.)

Narratively, Waddington describes the film as a feminist homage to stories like Lord of the Rings and Ender’s Game, centered on a group of young female protagonists and underpinned with some straightforward gender and class commentary.

After refusing to secure her family’s fortune by marrying a wealthy but boorish man, retro-future debutante Uma (Emma Roberts) wakes up in an island-bound reform school called Paradise Hills. Uma makes a failed bid for escape, but she soon realizes that Paradise Hills seems like more of a spa resort than a prison… except for the holographic carousel ride that plays video of Uma’s suitor. And the fact that she can’t seem to stay awake after dark. And and a few veiled threats from the Duchess (Milla Jovovich), Paradise Hills’ administrator.

Uma’s new roommates aren’t worried: Southern belle Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) sees their residence as a vacation from her overbearing family, and taciturn musician Yu (Awkwafina) just wants to be left alone. But rebellious pop star Amarna (Eiza González) suspects there’s something sinister afoot, and she agrees to help Uma get out. Amarna is correct, of course, and the secrets of Paradise Hills are even weirder than the average viewer might expect.

Paradise Hills is an explicit statement about how gender roles for women are often absurd, infantilizing, and repressive. Its characters are apparently in their mid-20s, but they’re treated like children, forced into identical white frocks and sent to mandatory salon sessions, tea parties, and yoga classes. (“I’ve always wanted to go to a fascist boarding school, so this is kind of a dream come true,” Uma quips to the Dutchess.) The facility’s official uniform is a corseted dress constructed from white straps and buckles — dainty and literally confining. In an obvious metaphor, the Dutchess spends most of her time stripping thorns from roses.

Granted, the sets and costumes complicate that statement a little because this nightmarish vision of femininity is also gorgeous and alluring. Like the similarly style-obsessed film version of The Hunger Games, Paradise Hills condemns a decadent, shallow aristocracy through a protagonist who’s forced to get amazing makeovers and attend swanky parties. The film doesn’t skimp on the underlying horror, but it still makes living in a dystopian society seem incredibly cool.

It’s bizarre and often delightful. Paradise Hills captures a futuristic fantasy aesthetic that feels familiar in video games, but fresh in movies. Its costumes would fit seamlessly into a Final Fantasy game, and the institute’s frilly, colorful gardens and parlors feel like a dark take on cybertwee. The island itself is a hyper-saturated paradise where every sandy inlet and rock face is just a little too perfectly sculpted. And while Paradise Hills isn’t epic or multilayered enough to stand alongside the works that inspired it, it isn’t dragged down by elaborate or self-serious world-building, either.

Paradise Hills never really explains who (or even what) the Dutchess is, but scenes like a mirror-based therapy session evoke both faux-New-Age self-help doctrine and old-fashioned witchiness. It’s unclear why Uma’s “rehabilitation” involves being buckled to a lone carousel horse, floated into the air, and surrounded by increasingly disturbing holographic video spheres, but the videos offer character backstory without seeming like clunky exposition. And the film’s simple narrative and obvious symbolism create a solid foundation for the more outré aspects.

Paradise Hills’ creators may not classify their work as young adult fiction, but their story has some of the same strengths and weaknesses as other YA dystopias, including The Hunger Games. Its conceit doesn’t leave much room for nuance, with characters who are thinly developed and played with varying levels of melodrama. Jovovich imbues the Dutchess with exaggerated, condescending smarminess, while Awkwafina offers a restrained take on Yu, one of the few characters who defies easy categorization.

Like many young adult sci-fi stories, though, Paradise Hills offers a space where young women’s competence and autonomy is taken for granted — even if the antagonists are determined to take it away. The film criticizes gender roles, but it doesn’t denigrate feminine qualities as weak or inherently fake. And it emphasizes the fact that that poorer (or “Lower,” in the film’s parlance) women still see this enforced hyper-femininity as a privilege in some particularly horrifying ways.

Paradise Hills ends with a couple of revelations that leave the rest of the plot harder to understand, even if you’ve partially anticipated what’s going on. The reveals could completely derail a more traditional film, but after the sheer amount of weirdness that’s already been delivered, almost any plot twist would feel like fair game.

Paradise Hills is disturbing but rarely violent, and although there’s implicit sexual coercion in Uma being sent to a reform school until she’s willing to marry, it’s muted. With its dark premise and some brief smoking, the film probably merits a PG-13.

Paradise Hills has cult-film potential, but it doesn’t seem destined for a major release, and it appears to still be looking for distribution.