'Paradise Hills'

The teens-in-danger thriller “Paradise Hills” is a feast for the eyes, as Spanish director Allice Waddington puts painterly settings to an engrossing thriller with a generous dollop of science fiction.

Emma Roberts stars as Uma, who wakes up in a strange bed, and finds herself in an even stranger facility on a remote island that something between a spa and a rehab clinic. She’s there along with several other teen girls, all wearing white dresses — corsets with white-vinyl straps by day, pouffy taffeta numbers by night — in a tightly regulated environment, overseen by someone called The Duchess (played by Mita Jovovich).

Uma — who, in a prologue set two months later, is getting married to a young capitalist shark (Arnaud Valois), so something must have worked — bonds quickly with three other guests. Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) is a plus-sized southern belle whose mama wants to be a pageant queen. Yu (Awkwafina) is being taught manners to please her Beijing grandparents. And Amarna (Eiza González) is a pop star who says she sent to the facility because her rebel streak was threatening her managers’ bottom line.

Uma plans to escape, to go back to her boyfriend Markus (Jeremy Irvine), of whom her mother disapproves because he’s not upper class. But when Markus suddenly appears on the island, working as a groundskeeper to be near her, Uma starts to realize something more sinister is happening.

Screenwriters Nacho Vigalondo (“Colossal”) and Brian DeLeeuw — fleshing out a story by Waddngton — steal from the best, with elements of Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” and Patrick McGoohan’s surrealist ‘60s series “The Prisoner” at play here. The narrative train nearly careens out of control toward the end, though, as the dark reality of The Duchess’ realm can’t quite be reconciled with its shimmering artifice.

But Waddington, a photographer and designer making an assured feature-film directing debut, polishes that artifice until it gleams, so it’s easy to get sucked into it. She finds the perfect visuals in the spa (the movie was filmed in the Canary Islands), a seductive trap of beautiful conformity, and places her headstrong heroines there to rise from pampered princesses to valiant valkyries. 

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‘Paradise Hills’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence, sexual content and some language. Running time: 95 minutes.