![]() ![]() There's both same- and opposite-sex kissing the camera cuts away after two characters kiss, implying that they had sex. It's also said that a character's father committed suicide. Others are attacked by plants a character's agonized face is seen. Characters are also stabbed and throttled one is killed, with blood on clothes but no gory wounds. Viewers see a man climbing on top of a woman and praising her for being so pliable before he's incapacitated. ![]() After her stay at the school, she consents and is basically ordered to have sex with her husband (though it doesn't wind up well for him). The main character, Uma ( Emma Roberts), is imprisoned because she won't marry a man she hates. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.Parents need to know that Paradise Hills is a sci-fi/fantasy movie about an upscale reform school where young women are transformed into obedient automatons. A late revelation about less privileged women shows a thematic road not taken even as it suggests that Waddington may have more to say about women and their seemingly never-ending escape. Alas, Roberts makes an unproductively wan center for this feminist allegory, which could have used more of the oomph that Awkwafina and Macdonald bring. As the mood and tone darken, the narrative grows more baroque, creepier, and this speculative fiction turns into a freakout, or at least tries to. At times, though, Uma’s lack of urgency feels more like an oversight, as if Waddington had spent so much time polishing the gears that she overlooked the machinery.ĭespite her shaky handle on the movie’s ideas and the appealing if uneven performances, Waddington holds your attention with visual beauty and humor. If anything, she can seem almost resigned, which indicates that the world beyond the island is more terrifying than suggested. Despite Uma’s stated unhappiness, the hovering male guards and her attempts to push back, she never seems really alarmed enough. At its center is the familiar fight over women’s bodies, a battle that seems already lost when the story opens. Set in a vague future that’s clearly in the grip of the past, “Paradise Hills” is very much a movie about the present. They sleep in identical beds in identical billowy nighties and wander around in dresses with Elizabethan-style bodices that flatten their breasts, as if to retard (and deny) their maturity and independence. While the Duchess floats through the orderly grounds like a Stepford Scarlett O’Hara - straw hats, cascading gowns, blank smiles - the inmates are pointedly dressed in girlish outfits, virginal white from their neck ruffs to their high-button boots. The director Alice Waddington sets the look and mood swiftly, most successfully through the costumes and the production design, both adorned with dollops of color and witty, texture-enriching filigree. Like exotic birds in gilded cages, they are at once pampered and imprisoned. When they exercise, they don’t break a sweat at dinner, they eat enforced meager rations. In flouncy old-fashioned uniforms, they cavort and submit, though some eye the exit. Overseen by the Duchess (an amusing Milla Jovovich), the women undergo various treatments, some more willingly than others. Uma soon discovers that Paradise Hills is a rehab center for privileged young women who don’t conform to their family’s antediluvian norms of femininity. Sun streams in from overhead, a taunting promise of the larger, lighter open world, and a resonant image in a movie filled with telegraphing visuals. It’s a pretty prison, with a grassy carpet and a painted landscape spreading across the walls. Its isolation is an early clue that something isn’t right on this putative Shangri-La where a young woman, Uma (Emma Roberts), is yelling to be let out of a locked room. The name “Paradise Hills” refers to a rehabilitation center on a verdant island. Whatever the reason, the bad times keep coming for women, who have battled odds, other people and sometimes monsters in modest fairy tales like “ Endzeit” and “ Into the Forest” as well as in larger-scaled apocalyptic fictions like “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Maybe it’s the times, and these chronicles of peril and resistance represent a mood (or a game plan). By turns puckish and grim, “Paradise Hills” is just the latest female-driven dystopian story to hit screens. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |