Cinema Sunday: Paradise Hills

This week, Cinema Sunday's "Journeys to Past & Future" looks ahead to the not too distant future, the worst excesses of today made manifest in a class driven tomorrow and one woman's battle against all that.

Paradise Hills is a 2019 Spanish film starring Emma Roberts as a young woman sent to Paradise to have her mind fucked with for sinister purposes.  

We open up at a wedding in the future. We know it's the future because we have sleek futuristic floating cars outside. Inside though is a bacchanal of ornately dressed high society types like it's 18th century Versailles or something.  

Singing a song that is disturbingly heavy on a "I only live to make my man happy" message is Uma.  Uma is toasted by her guests, gushing over her new compliant attitude. 

Upstairs, her new husband (his name is "Son"?) pins Uma to the bed and is just happy about her new obedient nature.

Who is Uma? Let's jump back in time two months.

Uma awakens in a strange room, trapped on an island called Paradise, a sort of treatment center for rebellious young women.  

Uma's mother admitted Uma to Paradise for rejecting a marriage proposal from Son her mother wanted her to accept. 

Uma becomes friends with other women who have been sent to the island for various reasons: 

• Chloe was sent to the island because she's fat.  
• Yu is clearly on the Autism spectrum and her family is pissed that she just won't get over it.
• Amarna is a well-known singer sent to Paradise after for being a strong willed, confident woman or per her management company, a bitch.  

Amarna reveals to Uma that she has her own secret plan to escape; her fans have smuggled her a rowboat she and Uma can use it to leave. 

Yes, Uma and Amarna are sparking but before they can put their plan into action, Amarna is informed that she has graduated early. Amarna kisses Uma goodbye.  

Later, the women get to see their famous graduate on TV and Uma is convinced the woman on screen is not Amarna.  

Among the treatments Uma has to endure is being forced to watch news reports of her father's involvement in a financial scandal and his subsequent suicide. Uma's reaction to this traumatic sequence is so severe, her handlers drug her and put her into solitary confinement. 

She wakes up 2 weeks later and meets the Duchess, the woman who runs the Paradise program.  The Duchess informs Uma she will be released from the program the next day. 

Uma doesn't trust this and thinks she should get off the island herself instead of being taking by the Duchess and her goons. 

Uma convinces Chloe and Yu to run away with her in the night, making use of Amarna's row boat. In the course of their escape, Yu is badly injured as the women find themselves in a control room where they learn the truth of Paradise.  

Paradise is not there to rehabilitate them, but to replicate them.  

Uma, Chloe and Yu meet their "replicants"; poor and lower-class women who have undergone extensive plastic and cosmetic surgeries and trained to mimic the voices and personalities of the patients so they can assume their identities. 

Uma leaves behind her memory locket of her father for her replacement and tells her that in order to fully embody Uma, she must hate Son, the man responsible for her father's death.

Yu and Chloe die and Uma finds her way to a rose garden where ensnared by thorns are the lifeless bodies of former Paradise captives... including Amarna. 

The Duchess is there and we find out she's a vampiric rosebush who...

Hold on! Who is a what now?

The Duchess is a vampiric rose bush.

Guys, we need to sit with this revelation for a moment.

<Interlude>

OK, where were we?

Oh, yeah! So Duchess is attacking Uma with her (sigh) vampiric rosebush thorns when Uma II (the replicant) shows up, distracts the Duchess so Uma I can fatally stab the Duchess. 

Uma and her replicant, Anna, manage to escape in the rowboat.

Back to the beginning of the movie. 

There's a party going on, Uma has just finished her song and everyone is gushing over her new compliant attitude. 

Upstairs, Son pins Uma to the bed and is just happy about her new obedient nature.

Uma stabs the son of a bitch. 

Then Uma enters the room, sees Son's bloody corpse on the bed and crosses over to the balcony where Uma is making her escape. 

Uma screams in horror. Oh no! Her new husband has been... MURDERED!!! 

The 2nd Uma who just arrived from downstairs is the replicant, Anna. (I mean, y'all figured that already, right?) She gets all the perks of her new high society life without the ickiness of having to fuck the conniving bastard Son. 

While the original Uma has disappeared into the night, to live her own life. 

The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Department 

• Danielle MacDonald who played Chloe was Lillian Roxon, Helen Reddy's best friend in I Am Woman.
• Yu is Awkwafina who stole the show from Simu Liu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.  
• Millo Jovovich who was the Duchess also played Leeloo de Sabat in The Fifth Element which I swear to God I am going to watch in it's entirety one day.    

OK, this movie....

This movie is challenging. 

I think this movie has a reach that exceeds it's grasp. There's a lot of stuff at play here. The roles society forces women to play. The widening wealth gap. Science out of control. But the movie ultimately lacks focus. 

I'm not sure how I feel about the twist that the women captives of Paradise are not being brainwashed but are being replaced. It does offer a statement that there the gap between rich and poor is so wide, there are women who are prepared to sacrifice their identities, their souls if you will, for a chance at a life beyond poverty and neglect.  

But if Uma and her fellow captives are being brainwashed, this gives them a threat to fight against, to fight for their own identities, their own souls. Instead they are merely raw material to be scanned and copied to make other women be like them, just more compliant. 

But the replicant twist does give Uma an unique opportunity to have her revenge on the man she holds responsible for her father's death, pairing up with herself for the perfect murder.

The Duchess being a (checks notes) vampiric rose bush? Yeah, that was a bit much.  

I think Paradise Hills might've made a better limited series, to take some time for world building for this future time and to develop Uma and the others more effectively.

OK, next week Cinema Sunday goes back to the past as a couple of con men in 1936 pull off a massive scam for a double shot of money and revenge.