Said Jesus: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Says this film: it is easier for a stray cat to enter the Eurozone than it is for an undocumented refugee.

Directed by Maria Sødahl (Hope, 2019), Paradis (aka The Last Resort) is a gripping, deeply discomforting Danish-Norwegian drama set in a resort on the Canary Islands and focused on a middle-class family treating itself to an all-inclusive holiday.

You know the kind: all-you-can-eat buffets; kids entertained for free while parents relax poolside with a cocktail; bus tours during the day and karaoke parties at night. Not quite White Lotus, but comfortable and familiar, and schoolteacher Mikkel (Esben Smed) and upper-echelon bureaucrat Louise (Danica Curcic) feel they deserve some pampering.

Danica Curcic and Esben Smed in Paradis/The Last Resort

All is going well – save for a couple of uncomfortable encounters with fellow tourists – until Mikkel’s hire car hits someone on an unlit road. The victim is badly shaken, his leg is bleeding, and the family does the right thing: they take him to hospital. While waiting for treatment, the man (Aziz Çapkurt) reveals that he is Ahmed, an undocumented migrant from Afghanistan. Somewhat guiltily, they leave him in the hospital corridor. Mikkel presses some euros into his hand and leaves his phone number. Just in case.

But that’s not the end of the encounter. The next day, Ahmed turns up at the resort, wanting – and needing – more help. Again, Mikkel gives him money, hoping Ahmed will go away and those unpleasant guilty feelings can be forgotten. But Ahmed is nothing if not persistent. He has daughters too, he says, and they are in danger, being held hostage by traffickers. With every encounter, his story becomes more urgent, more desperate.
Mikkel wants to help – but how? Louise is alert to the possibility that Ahmed might just be pumping them for cash. Are his stories true?

Danica Curcic and Esben Smed in Paradis/The Last Resort

Meanwhile, boats are coming ashore packed with Africans trying to make their way into Europe. The resort staff are panicked; the locals are organising vigilante gangs. What started as a holiday is now an in-your-face encounter with the worldwide migration crisis.

It almost goes without saying that Paradis is an uncomfortable watch. Sødahl probes Western – and more specifically Scandinavian – privilege and guilt with unflinching precision. Nobody is a hero – not Mikkel or Louise, certainly; not even the people who work with the refugees; not the refugees themselves. Ahmed is at once sympathetic yet shifty, to the point where you wonder whether the road accident was staged. Everyone – including the charming resort waiter Pedro – will go to extremes to guard what they have from new arrivals they perceive as a threat to their livelihoods.

Sødahl’s careful building of momentum and tension keeps you on the hook throughout. The contrast between the resort’s abundance and the miseries of refugee camp life is brutal, as is the film’s interrogation of “liberal” values and attitudes that are, for the most part, untested by the realities of a migration crisis whose enormity, the film suggests, brings out the worst in everyone it touches.

You leave Paradis with your moral compass spinning.

Paradis plays in the Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival, from 2 July.