The Big Picture
- Paradise raises important ethical and philosophical questions about sacrifice, ageism, and the moral implications of buying and selling years of life.
- Max and Elena's tragic story takes unexpected turns as they navigate the dystopian world of youth transplants and a society obsessed with staying young.
- The ending sees Max joining a rebel army to destroy technology that steals youth, while Elena chooses a life of normalcy and leaves behind the fight for change. The future remains uncertain for the powerful Aeon company and its CEO Sophie.
Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Netflix's Paradise.
Even though a movie with subtitles is not everyone’s cup of tea, German Netflix film Paradise is the kind that quickly gets you hooked from the moment you press play. The dystopia takes place on a highly technological yet grim reality: Filthy rich people are able to buy years off poor people's lives, which means they sell their actual lifetime in order to be able to live with some dignity. This is done through Aeon, a company that makes the "youth transplants" possible.
Paradise raises a lot of questions, and a lot of them are ethical and philosophical ones: Is it better to live a short yet comfortable life? Should money be the decisive factor to guarantee that someone can have the best life possible? Does society have an ageism problem? And most of all, just because you can reduce someone’s life expectancy in benefit of your own, is it right to do it?
These are just some questions that Paradise puts in the back of our minds and invites discussions that extend to way after the movie has ended. But there are some questions related to the story that are way easier to answer — the biggest one being, of course, the mystery that takes over half of the movie to be resolved.
The Biggest Mystery in 'Paradise': Who Is the Girl Max Kidnapped?
The story of Elena (Marlene Tanczik and Corinna Kirchhoff) and Max (Kostja Ullmann) gets tragic pretty fast. Max works as an agent from Aeon who goes around convincing poor people to sell some years of their lives. The tables turn when his wife Elena does a bad deal and is required to give up 40 years of her life (and youth) to pay up. Her years are taken by Aeon CEO Sophie Thiessen (Iris Berben and Alina Levshin), so Max kidnaps a girl that might very well be a Sophie that is 40 years younger after getting her “youth transplant.”
However, the girl says she is actually Marie Thiessen (Lisa-Marie Koroll), Sophie's daughter. And it turns out that she is telling the truth. She is indeed the daughter of Sophie, and the real Sophie has started a massive manhunt to retrieve her child and arrest (and maybe kill) Max and his wife.
Does Elena Ever Get Her 40 Years Back?
Yes, but not in the way that Max originally planned. The husband discovers Elena could get her youth back through a procedure in one of the clandestine clinics, but before all of that he has to make sure that the girl he kidnapped is indeed Sophie Thiessen. Once he finds out she isn’t, he still believes Marie might be a match and that Elena could still get her youth back. But then the tables get turned.
Once Elena realizes that Sophie will pull out all the stops to get her daughter back, she decides she’ll make the CEO pay in her own dime by stealing 40 years off the life of her daughter. Max starts having second thoughts, but Elena decides vengeance is the only way — especially after she realizes that Marie is also ready to kill her if it means escaping the couple’s clutches.
So, Elena ends up dumping Max in the middle of a road and drives to the Lithuania clandestine clinics, where she performs the transplant and gets her 40 years back. This means, of course, that Marie — the only true victim in the story — ages 40 years overnight, and after she’s returned to her mother, she has the brutal realization that Sophie has no intention of giving up her own youth to save her daughter.
How Do Max and Elena Escape?
After finding the clandestine clinics, it seems like Elena doesn’t want to look back and aims for a life that’s as normal as possible. She’s young again, she has a new husband and is expecting a child – like she was in the beginning of the movie. Her final scene suggests she chose to alienate herself to the issues of the society she’s lived in. It seems like she is content with living a life with no rebellions and no questioning authority.
After getting dumped in the middle of a road in Lithuania, Max discovers a refugee camp in which it’s pretty clear that a new society is forming — a society in which people age normally. Max realizes that both Aeon and clandestine clinics are doing criminal work, and he joins the rebel army in order to destroy all technology that allows people to steal youth from one another. He also sees this as a way to atone for his past, during which he spent his days convincing marginalized people to sell a portion of their lives so they could make a quick profit.
Why Don’t Max and Elena End Up Together?
The change in point of views from Max and Elena, and the way they break apart makes it clear they reached a point in their lives in which their ethics are fundamentally different. Both of them are pushed to their breaking points, and Elena realizes that her own interests and happiness must be a priority in her life. And that doesn’t come to her by chance: Once she realizes that she was set up to give up her 40 years, she decides she could trust no one and there was no use trying to join a fight that just might end up killing her and not changing the status quo.
Max, on the other hand, was trying to do the right thing from the start, even though he didn’t have the best methods. First, he thought he was helping poor people live with dignity, then he thought he was doing what his wife wanted. It takes him a long time to realize that the problem is with society as a whole, and a drastic change needs to happen so that the events of the movie don’t keep happening. He can’t stay with Elena because he can’t live a life of inertia after discovering a whole community that fights for the change he wants to see.
What Happens to the Actual Sophie Thiessen?
After almost getting shot to death, Sophie apparently gives up on chasing Max and Elena. But she suggests she'll keep looking for a match donor so that her daughter Marie can get her 40 years back. She says she wasn't a match, but chances are she's lying and just doesn't want to give up her newfound youth. Sophie also suggests she'll keep working on making Aeon even more powerful, which sets up an even darker future for whoever tries to take them down.
You can stream Paradise on Netflix.
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