Film Review — Paradise (2023)

Straight-to-Netflix sci-fi is a waste of a good concept.

When a woman is forced to give up 40 years of her life as payment for a debt, her husband desperately searches for a way to get them back.

★★☆☆☆

German sci-fi thriller Paradise has an intriguing concept: In the near future, humanity has developed technology that allows the transfer of lifespan from one person to another. It’s essentially a less flashy version of Andrew Niccol’s In Time, another film that used, yes, time as a form of currency to say something about capitalism and the class divide.

But this new take seems at odds with what it actually wants to be. It has smart ideas; a moral conundrum at its midpoint is a particular highlight. But its intellectual qualities are drowned out by banal tropes and action scenes, low-grade, “made for Netflix” special effects, and music that switches between bargain basement Hans Zimmer, and unbearable electro covers of old pop songs that usually feature in trailers.

In more skilled hands this could’ve been special. As it is, Paradise — I’m actually still not sure why it’s called that —is just another bang-average genre title, destined to spend eternity gathering dust on your streaming watchlist.

Originally published at michaelkenny.uk