Barely five minutes in, my excitement for one of my most anticipated horror releases of the year had already taken a hit. I'd been waiting since 2024 for this film (originally slated for release that year before being pushed to 2025), and within moments I felt the hype slipping away.
This is indie, low-budget horror, so I want to be fair and acknowledge both its strengths and its flaws. Some of the visuals are striking, effectively capturing the hallucinatory, almost 1970s exploitation-film aesthetic that Marcel Walz seems to be aiming for, thanks to the use of natural lighting.
Garden of Eden blends elements of drug-induced delusions, religious fervour (snakes, statues, crucifixes, and other religious iconography), and sexual repression-particularly towards women-into a surreal fever dream that occasionally plagues the film and hints at something evil lurking within their home. The gore works best in still moments rather than during the action, offering a few strong, if brief, horror-tableau images.
Unfortunately, the problems set in quickly. Around the half-hour mark-in a film that runs over two hours-I was already fighting boredom. The narrative meanders endlessly, circling through repetitive, underdeveloped ideas. It toys with big ideas-women's rights, LGBTQIA+ issues, gender politics, cult fanaticism-but never commits, leaving each as a shallow suggestion rather than meaningful commentary, lurching into yet another gratuitous but oddly hollow gore scene.
The dialogue doesn't help. Often awkward, it undercuts even the better horror moments-including one involving a fishing rod that should have been shocking, but instead drew more laughter than gasps. We've seen these beats done far more effectively elsewhere.
Editing is where the film really loses its footing. There are glimpses of a stylish, confident horror movie trying to break through-a well-framed shot here, a clever transition there-but they're buried in a jumble of jarring cuts, awkward scene transitions, and moments that feel stitched together without rhythm. Sequences don't build tension so much as stumble from one to the next, leaving the pacing uneven and the emotional beats flat.
The result is less a cohesive narrative and more a moodboard of ideas that never quite click together, as if the film couldn't decide whether it wanted to be art-house horror, exploitation shocker, or surrealist fever dream-so it settled for being a confused mix of all three.
Blunt advice: don't let sponsored influencers convince you this is a hidden gem. Watch what genuinely interests you and form your own opinion-whether that's positive or negative. Garden of Eden isn't salvation-it's cinematic purgatory. Watch only if you're assembling a so-bad-it's-funny double feature, and keep the other movie ready to save your night.
