It is a truth universally acknowledged that a director in possession of good production design must be in want of a script. This rendering of Jane Austin's famous opening line is borne out by Spanish fashion photographer-cum-film director Alice Waddington in her feature debut, Paradise Hills. The lavish visual imagery that will draw viewers into its alternately whimsical and menacing world is ultimately undermined by a script that cannot unify the film's wandering plot lines and philosophical dead ends.
At the heart of Waddington's dystopian fable is a patriarchal and pecuniary challenge reminiscent of that faced by Elizabeth Bennet's family: the desire to rescue themselves by marrying off a daughter to a gentleman of means. Independent Uma (Emma Roberts), though, has no intention of being used for such mercenary purposes. Besides, we will find out she's in love with someone else, a member of the underclass known as a “lower.” Uma's mother has at her disposal, however, means the Bennets could never have conceived.
After an unnecessary prologue, Uma awakes to find herself inexplicably transported to Paradise Hills, an island institution that is part sanitorium, part boarding school that resembles a mash-up of the Red Queen's Croquet-Ground and M.C. Escher architecture. The facility is presided over by The Duchess (Milla Jovavich), who beatifically floats along the garden paths in crinoline gowns and wide-brimmed hats, counseling her charges as she methodically clips the thorns from her cut roses.
Of course, removing the thorns is what Paradise Hills is all about. The students, all “difficult” girls like Uma, are subjected to regimens of yoga, makeovers and restrictive yet mandatory meals, as well as periodic psychological conditioning—with more than a hint of the reprogramming that Alex undergoes in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange—while strapped to a carousel horse and suspended several stories in the air. The official school uniform, white Victorian-style dress, Elizabethan collar, and straitjacket-style straps across the chest and shoulders, is a costuming triumph and the literal embodiment of the program's goal: feminine submission.
Uma finds confederates in Yu (Awkwafina), Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) and Amarna (Eiza González), but their interactions are limited to dainty meals with large helpings of exposition as they begin to realize that darker forces are at work in Paradise. Screenwriters Brian Deeleuw and Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) seem so concerned with setting up the Stepford Wives-meets-US twists in the third act (some inexplicable; others compelling but too late) that they forget to develop the characters to any significant degree.
Still, for young girls unfamiliar with the film's touchstones, raising questions about class, identity and equality amid the wild, imaginative environs of Paradise Hills might have the same mind-blowing effect that Rollerball and Logan's Run—neither cinematic classics—did for certain young boys decades ago.