A man wakes up in a cave. He has a corpse beside him, and no memory of who he is or how he came to be in this place. Setting out to explore, he quickly stumbles across automated video messages, and an apparently insane man who appears to be physically integrated with a strange plant. He also finds himself menaced by both armoured figures and animalistic mutants.
What's going on? Why is here? These are of course the questions that our nameless protagonist wants to answer, provided he can stay alive long enough to do so.
Eden Log is a French science fiction horror film. It does not appear to have had a substantial financial backing, and utilises a lot of darkness and a deliberately muted palette (at times, it feels like it is black and white) as what I imagine was both a cost saving measure - it limits the sets and make-up you will need, and how sophisticated they need to be - and a stylistic choice. The overall look conveys the grimy squalor of this dystopic future and makes the occasional (muted) splash of colour the more notable for its rarity.
Unfortunately, for my taste this visual style is the main thing the film has going for it, as neither the performances nor the script left me all that impressed. The delivery of dialogue, at least in the English language version I saw, is rather wooden. I expect the actors were probably more comfortable in their native French. The story, meanwhile, feels rather stretched even for a (these days) relatively trim run time of 100 minutes. It would probably have worked better as an episode of a science fiction anthology series like the Outer Limits, where it would have been only half that length. Also, it includes a sexual assault scene that could (and should) have been omitted.
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