From Spanish director Alice Waddington, the sci-fi/fantasy thriller Paradise Hills is about what happens when a young woman named Uma (Emma Roberts) finds herself at a high-end facility, run by the mysterious Duchess (Milla Jovovich), where families send their daughters to be reformed into the perfect versions of themselves. Through treatments that include etiquette classes, beauty regimens and restricted diets, the young women are given two month to resolve all physical and emotional shortcomings before returning home, but nothing in Paradise Hills is what it seems and there is a much more sinister motive to it all. …

We interview Paradise Hills director Alice Waddington about combining fantasy and sci-fi for the dystopian film, and her vision for the movie.

Emma Roberts is a young woman trapped in a deceptively beautiful cage in director Alice Waddington's upcoming film Paradise Hills. The trailer for Roberts' upcoming film arrived this week. Paradise Hills goes big on the visuals, promising to take viewers into a dystopian world unlike they've never seen before — and probably won't want to leave. But alas, this is a dark sci-fi tale, as the trailer quickly reveals. The trailer sticks closely to the film's protagonist, Uma (Roberts). It opens with Uma waking up in a room painted to mimic the outdoors. Unsure of how …

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If Paradise Hills put half the effort into its story that it does into costumes and production design, it would be a decent sci-fi film. Instead, Alice Waddington’s movie is content to crib from The Prisoner, The Stepford Wives, and The Hunger Games without bothering to understand or engage with the subtext of those stories. Paradise Hills wants to create a disturbing dystopia, but without any sense of danger or fear. Instead, it relies on weak twists that range from dull to laughably nonsensical. At some point in the future or in an alternate reality (it’s never …

One of the more intriguing films making its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival is Paradise Hills, a fantasy thriller from first-time feature director Alice Waddington, who set the genre festival circuit aflame with her breakthrough horror short, Disco Inferno. Waddington conceived the original story of Paradise Hills, with scripting duties falling to Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) and Brian DeLeeuw (Some Kind of Hate). Collider has an exclusive image from the buzzy film, which gives you a sense of how stacked the ensemble cast is with rising stars and familiar faces like Danielle Macdonald (Bird Box), Eiza Gonzalez (…