Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Paradise’ on Netflix, a Dystopian Sci-fi Thriller from Germany

German sci-fi thriller Paradise (now on Netflix) asks the tantalizing question: What if time was money? And not in the old-adage, metaphorical sense, but literally? Director Boris Kunz’s film establishes a not-too-far-off future society where people can sell or donate actual years from their lives, years that others can use to prolong their own lives. As always is the case with high-concept fodder, the question is whether the premise holds up under scrutiny – or at least paints over an absurd concept with some compelling drama and/or action.

PARADISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Max (Kostja Ullmann) as he gives a young man, maybe in his late teens, a hard sell: Give up 15 years of his life in exchange for €700,000. Think of everything you could do with that money, Max says. Your family would no longer be poor and living in a hovel, your father could start a business, and all that. The kid agrees, and Max makes his way from the area on the wrong side of the tracks – it looks like the urban hell of Children of Men or Beau is Afraid – past armed guards and fences and to the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, where the streets are clean and non-chaotic. Another day, another deal for Max’s employer, Aeon, for whom he’s brokered 276 years, earning him a salesman of the year award from CEO Sophie Thiessen (Iris Berben). Then he goes home to his fancy-ass apartment for dinner and oral sexytimes with his wife Elena (Marlene Tanczik), who’s a doctor, a profession that, in this timeline, is a lot like teachers in our own in that they’re essential cornerstones of society who earn a shekel or two more than diddly-squat. Meanwhile, leaders of a counter-Aeon movement target Thiessen, committing murderous acts of terrorism against de-aged people. Consider the dystopia established!

Max and Elena visit her parents for dinner. Her father isn’t so sure about Max’s moral values, and debates him. It’s obvious that what Max and Aeon do is awful, ripe for corruption and only deepens the divide between the haves and the have-nots. We’re all thinking it: What kind of creep does this? But Max delivers a quality-over-quantity argument and then he and Elena go home to find their apartment in flames. The insurance company says someone left a candle burning so they’re not paying up and our protags are on the hook for €2.5 million right now. And you thought insurance companies couldn’t get any worse! Of course, they don’t have that kind of money, and this is where we learn that banks could actually get worse, too: In order to acquire the apartment, Elena put down 40 years of her life as collateral. And now it’s time to collect.

For Max, this is a lesson in, you know, whaddayacallit, irony. Big, fat, flaming-hot-cheeto irony. This is when we see the procedure: Elena is strapped in a chair and three needles are inserted into her side. That’s it. Anticlimactic, ain’t it? Then she goes home and over the course of some unspecified amount of time that’s significantly less than 40 years, she ages 40 years, and is now thankfully not played by Tanczik in old-lady makeup or with a CGI’d face, but Corinna Kirchhoff. At this point, we learn a few things that really get the plot rolling: The procedure can be reversed. The donor and the recipient need to have a DNA match in order for it to work. There are black-market firms in Lithuania that’ll perform the procedure. And Sophie Thiessen over there – is it me, or does she look younger now? Like, 40 years or so, if I had to guess. THE PLOT THICKS. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Paradise covers similar conceptual territory as In Time, and it also has the look and feel of Gattaca’s future dystopia. (Notably, both of those movies are directed by Andrew Niccol.)

Performance Worth Watching: Tanczik and Kirchhoff provide a sturdy emotional foundation to a film that barely has room for such a thing.

Memorable Dialogue: Elena’s jokey mantra she repeats, re: any moral compromise she made marrying Max: “I love him despite his being a small cog in the capitalist machine.”

Sex and Skin: Max has no problem whatsoever going down on Young Elena or Old Elena. That’s love!

Our Take: Paradise – nonsense title, by the way – has the trappings of a movie ripe for an English-language remake populated by a couple of A-listers. And for once, it’d be worthwhile, since there’s plenty of room for improvement here. Plenty. Conceptually, it’s absurd in a pragmatic sense (the movie’s all the better for not even attempting to explain the science behind it) but philosophically compelling: What makes for a more valuable life, the length or the girth? I don’t have a good answer for that, which is grist for the mill of contemplation.

But instead of exploring this idea in a thoughtful manner, Paradise is a raging mediocrity that devolves into formulaic drivel: kidnapping, shootouts, dopey twists, that old scene where our on-the-run protagonists find a random car that inevitably has the keys in it because if it didn’t the plot would come to a screeching halt, etc. There’s even a scene where a character nearly dies after sinking into quicksand. Quicksand! Shut up with the quicksand! When’s the last time we saw that demon quicksand in a movie? The ’50s? The movie accidentally comments on itself when a character utters amidst all the hoopla, “There has to be another way than this free-for-all.”

Visually, the film is competent but mundane, its moody colors and lighting and boilerplate action sequences lifted from dozens of dystopian brouhahas before it. Although Kunz and a small pile of screenwriters work in a modicum of world-building, they mostly shun the implications of this society for action-thriller cliches. There’s little attempt to dig deeper into Max, who’s been sliding down a slippery ethical slope and now finds himself trying to climb back up, and Elena is rarely more than a plot device. And the third act is monumentally dumb, just one eyeroll after another after another. Paradise is a classic case of decent concept/lousy execution.

Our Call: How much is two hours of your life worth? SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.