Paradise (2023)
Sri Lanka's film industry has spent much of the past decade quietly building a reputation for thoughtful, socially conscious drama, and Prasanna Vithanage has been one of its most persistent advocates. His earlier work, including With You, Without You (2012) and Oba Nathuwa Oba Ekka (2012), earned him considerable respect on the festival circuit for handling personal and political grief with a light, assured touch. Paradise, co-produced between Sri Lanka and India under Newton Cinema's banner, represents his most internationally minded project to date, arriving at a moment when the world's attention had only recently shifted away from the extraordinary images of protesters storming the presidential residence in Colombo during the country's catastrophic economic crisis of 2022. That crisis, born of crippling foreign debt, fuel shortages, and widespread power cuts, brought ordinary Sri Lankan life to a near standstill, and it provides the backdrop against which this film sets its story. Choosing to make that backdrop the frame for a much smaller, more personal story is not without precedent, and films like Memoria have shown how effectively a country's ambient unease can press itself into a character's inner life. Whether the approach works here is another matter entirely.
The premise places an Indian couple, five years married and travelling to Sri Lanka's hill country to mark the occasion, directly into the path of that social upheaval. The hill region itself, with its colonial-era tea plantations, mist-draped slopes, and genuinely arresting light, is the kind of location that almost does a cinematographer's job for them, and the production does make the most of it on a modest budget that the finished film never feels too embarrassed about. Roshan Mathew, known to many from his work in Malayalam cinema and the Amazon series Cold Case, is a performer with real range, and Darshana Rajendran has similarly distinguished herself in Malayalam and Tamil productions as an actor capable of holding complex, ambivalent characters together. On paper, then, this is a pairing with plenty of potential. The supporting cast, including Mahendra Perera and Shyam Fernando on the Sri Lankan side, brings a sense of local grounding to a film that might otherwise risk feeling like a tourist's view of crisis. South Asian cinema has produced some extraordinary work that finds the personal inside the political, from the landmark river dramas reviewed here in A River Called Titas to the kinetic, crowd-pleasing nationalism of RRR, and Paradise is clearly reaching, in its own quieter register, for something in that tradition of stories where history and private feeling collide.
The film runs a fairly lean 94 minutes, which in theory ought to keep things focused, and Vithanage has spoken in interviews about wanting to examine the way external collapse can hold up a mirror to what is already broken inside a relationship. It is the kind of idea that rewards a filmmaker willing to trust their audience and resist the urge to spell everything out. Whether that trust is repaid, and whether the ambition survives contact with the script and the performances, is precisely what this review addresses.
Prasanna Vithanage’s 2023 drama Paradise is more ambition than actual performance. The premise is compelling enough: an Indian tourist couple arrives in the lush hill country of Sri Lanka to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, only for a sudden, unexpected turn of events to expose the deep, irreparable cracks in their relationship.
Setting this intimate marital breakdown against the very real, chaotic backdrop of the 2022 Sri Lankan economic and political riots is a bold, fascinating choice. Visually, the film is a triumph, capturing the stunning, vibrant landscapes of the island with a gorgeous, cinematic eye that really makes you appreciate the beauty of the setting.
Unfortunately, despite this striking and well-intentioned setup, the execution just doesn't quite land. The script is, frankly, awful, relying on clunky dialogue and contrived conflicts that never feel earned. When you’re trying to weave a marital crisis into a genuine geopolitical emergency, the stakes need to feel incredibly high, but instead, the handling of the 2022 riots felt almost like a mockery of that very real moment, using a national tragedy merely as a convenient plot device to force the couple apart.
To make matters worse, the acting isn't much better, and the main characters are so deeply unlikable and poorly written that I found myself trying incredibly hard just to stay invested in their plight.
It’s a real shame, because Vithanage is clearly aiming for something profound about how external chaos mirrors internal collapse, and I really wanted the film to succeed. But when the characters are this difficult to root for and the narrative is this weak, that profound message just gets lost in the noise.
Ultimately, Paradise is just a below-average Netflix film that squanders a brilliant premise and a beautiful setting on a deeply flawed script. It’s a well-intentioned misfire that proves a gorgeous backdrop can't save a story when the emotional foundation is this shaky.
Paradise is a film that leaves you a little melancholy, though perhaps not in the way its director intended. The raw materials are genuinely promising: a country at a flashpoint, a relationship on the edge, landscapes that could carry almost any emotional weight you chose to place on them. And yet good intentions and beautiful countryside have never been quite enough on their own, as anyone who has sat through a polished but unremarkable prestige production will recognise. For viewers curious about Sri Lankan cinema and what the island's filmmakers are doing with the cultural space opened up by the crisis years, The Sailor might be a more rewarding place to start. As for Paradise itself, it stands as a reminder that the gap between a great idea and a great film is sometimes the whole distance.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-06-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Paradise (2023) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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