The Beach

Paradise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in director Danny Boyle’s adaptation of novelist (and later screenwriter) Alex Garland’s hipster take on “Lord of the Flies.” Richard (British in the book; Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) is a young backpacker whose night in a Thailand hostel puts him in contact with Daffy (Robert Carlyle), a twitchy fellow traveler who hands over a map to a secret secluded island that (almost) no one knows about; Richard befriends the hot French couple in the next room (Virginie Ledoyen and Guillaume Canet) and soon the three merry wanderers are off in search of this elusive utopia, which ends up being a haven for misfits (that’s this close to an enormous marijuana plantation guarded by men with guns) – and one lorded over by Sal (Tilda Swinton), a woman whose leadership tactics flirt with full-blown fascism. After a few good weeks of living off the land (and the grid), the island is plagued with sickness, sexual tensions, shark attacks and potential exposure to the outside world, leading to Richard’s exile in the wilderness as a would-be lookout and where his devolution involves him hallucinating that he’s living inside one of the video games he’s so addicted to. Beauty and danger are one and the same in this scathing commentary on the inherent hypocrisy in trying to remove oneself from contemporary culture and society, packaged as a hippie thriller featuring Boyle’s trademark flamboyant camera work and rapid-fire editing set to a techno beat. – IFC Staff