Paradise Hills is a 2019 fantasy sci-fi thriller directed by Alice Waddington.
The movie follows Uma (Emma Roberts), a teen girl sent away to an idyllic school on an isolated island, managed by the mysterious Duchess (Milla Jovovich), where young, rebellious women are shaped into proper ladies. Uma befriends her roommates, Yu (Awkwafina) and Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) and a troubled teen star called Amarna (Eiza González), and together they find the dark secrets hiding beneath the school's beautiful surface.
Tropes
- Costume Porn: The dresses on the island are beautifully ornamented and designed, especially those worn by the Duchess.
- Dwindling Party: The story basically starts with 4 characters. However, after Amarna is released from the facility, the party starts to vanish one by one.
- Foreshadowing: Early on, Amarna and Uma arrange to meet each other at night, but neither of them manage to stay awake for it. This is an early hint that they are being sedated every night.
- Load-Bearing Boss: Killing the Duchess causes her secret lair underground to collapse.
- Motif: The Duchess has a subtle motif of broken glass and is often associated with it when her facade of niceness is cracking. Considering she is creating substitutes of the girls (essentially wrong reflections), associating her with broken mirrors is very fitting.
- Once More, with Clarity: In the opening scene, Uma is marrying Son, and they're about to consummate their marriage. Then the film cuts to two months before to show what happened. Uma and her substitute Anna, work in tandem to assassinate Son, with Uma seducing and killing him in their wedding bed, and then Anna, having been at the party all along, goes upstairs and screams to fake that she has just found the body, while Uma escapes.
- The Reveal:
- The girls aren't being trained, they're being studied and observed in order to turn other girls into perfect copies of them. Even Markus is in on it, as he is just a performer meant to seduce Uma into showcasing her sexual conduct so it can be incorporated into her substitute.
- The Duchess is a kind of plant being that feeds off the girls' life forces.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: The milk the girls are offered every night is laced with something that makes sure all the girls will sleep through the night.
