THE ABSENCE OF EDEN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Absence of Eden, Roadside Attractions / Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 12, 2024

The Absence of Eden tells two stories from separate perspectives of immigration from Mexico into the United States. One follows a rookie agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as he learns the ropes of the job. The other tracks a woman fleeing her home in Mexico, taking a dangerous route toward and across the border, and discovering that the opportunities available to her in this place might be as perilous as the situation she was escaping.

It's inevitable that these two characters in director Marco Perego and Rick Rapoza's screenplay will collide in some way, and the problem isn't that it takes so long for this to happen or that the encounter amounts to an anticlimax of sorts. In fact, that's one of the more intriguing parts of this story, which doesn't do enough with the two protagonists separately to give their belated and brief encounter the kind of thematic weight the filmmakers clearly want it to have.

Theoretically, it makes a certain bit of sense, especially when it becomes apparent that the ICE agent, a man named Shipp and played by Garrett Hedlund with quiet uncertainty, is the real central figure here. He has joined the agency, not out of some sense of duty or belief in the law, but simply because his estranged father is the sort of man who has had plenty of run-ins with the police. He's a cop, basically, to irritate the man, who keeps calling Shipp and leaving apologetic voicemails—neither of which the son answers.

On the other side of the border, Esmee (Zoe Saldana) works as a stripper at a club that, apparently, doesn't have the most gentlemanly of clientele. In her introduction, she's harassed, assaulted, and held at gunpoint by one customer, and as the camera moves away from the scene, it returns after a pair of gunshots. Esmee has killed the man, and now, she has to leave her grandmother, her home, and her country, lest either the law or any of the dead guy's associates find her.

These situations, obviously, are very, very different, and Perego smartly treats them as such in multiple ways. Shipp's side of the narrative is inherently restrained, because it's about a man who doesn't seem to know who he is, what he believes, or what he wants out of life. Despite having a job steeped in rules and regulations, he's basically aimless and distanced from everything.

That makes the routine of the job easy for him, but when a couple of raids result in violence, it's at least obvious that he has a bit of a crisis of conscience about the darker aspects of the work. A newfound romance with Yadira (Adria Arjona), whom he meets at a local bar on his off-hours, lets us know Shipp's not as off-handedly prejudiced as his partner Dobbins (Chris Coy). Yadira is a single mother and, more to the point of the movie's broad thematic content, the daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico.

If Shipp's story is reserved and more about a mood of general unease, Esmee's is almost entirely visceral. It's all about the dangers of crossing the border—traveling long distances on foot or in the darkened backs of assorted vehicles, having to deal with coyotes and various associates who either make their bad intentions clear or keep them hidden enough to earn some trust, being sold to and separated from loved ones by Americans whose motives will only be known to those who leave the story at that moment. One such separation puts Esmee in the position of watching over a young girl.

The narrative, then, is in conflict with itself in an intriguing way, juxtaposing the internal conflict faced by Shipp with the harrowing string of external obstacles faced by Esmee. It's a compelling idea, especially in how the contrast makes it apparent how low-stakes Shipp's personal crisis, which is so overwhelming and all-encompassing to him, is compared to Esmee's experiences.

The main idea, perhaps, is one of basic sympathy, since we're left to imagine that everyone Shipp comes into contact with during his work has a story similar to Esmee's in some way. The guy gets a taste of it, perhaps, in his relationship with Yadira, but everyone else he encounters is an anonymous target. When the certain crossing of these two stories occurs, the question is how Shipp will react, based on how much he has or hasn't learned from his own experiences.

In theory, it's a strong idea, but in practice, Perego and Rapoza are too hasty in setting up the split scenarios, meaning that the whole story plays like a solid idea that's developed at a bare minimum. As good as the main performances are here, neither Shipp nor Esmee come across as more than pawns in the filmmakers' big design conflicting storylines that will, well, result in some more tangible conflict when they finally meet. In other words, The Absence of Eden comes across more as an attempt at a clever piece of narrative trickery than a fleshed-out story.

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