Kevin Brianton, Senior Adjunct Research Fellow, La Trobe University Melbourne
The idea of a holiday resort is that you and your family go away and let go of all the stresses and concerns of everyday life. Food, drink, and sun are the keys to enjoying life. Located off the Northwest coast of Africa, the Canary Islands offer many resorts that offer carefree living. It is also a major frontline for migrants and refugees crossing the Atlantic from West Africa to Europe, with tens of thousands arriving every year. It is the perfect location to explore the battleground between these issues.
These two worlds collide in a film directed by Maria Sødahl, and it has already won the most prestigious prize in Nordic cinema, the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the 2026 Göteborg Film Festival. Sødahl also co-wrote the screenplay with SoEske Troelstrup, and Therese Hasman. Aside from this work, she is a director and writer, known for Hope (2019) and Limbo (2010). The Oscar-nominated Hope deals with a couple as they respond to a cancer diagnosis.
In this film, she now turns to broader social issues, casting an idyllic, all-inclusive family vacation as a profound political and moral trap. Paradis offers a tense drama that examines Western privilege amid a staggering international crisis. It begins simply enough with a family ushered into a palatial room in a lovely resort. A comfortably well-off Danish couple, Mikkel, played by Espen Smed, and Louise, played by Danica Ćurčić, arrive on the Canary Islands with their two young daughters for a week of holiday fun. They are looking to escape the drab pressures of everyday life within the safe, curated bubble of a luxury resort.
That bubble doesn’t pop, but it slowly deflates as the film progresses. Even in the safe confines of the resort, boats carrying desperate refugees are washing up along the shore. After an idyllic day out at the beach, the couple accidentally hits a refugee with their car. They take him to a hospital, give him some money, and that appears to be the end of the matter. When the injured man tracks them down later and pleads for help, the family’s liberal values are put to a harsh test. What starts as an impulse of basic human decency slowly spirals into paranoia as his requests grow, forcing the family to reckon with how much of their own safety they are genuinely willing to risk.
What makes The Last Resort so deeply uncomfortable is Sødahl’s refusal to turn this into a standard Hollywood thriller. Even a member of the local fascist group dedicated to beating up refugees is a kind and polite waiter – there are no easy outs. The resort owner is desperately trying to maintain a respectable façade while people arrive and die on the beach. Even the injured refugee Ahmed, played by Aziz Çapkurt, could be a little dishonest in his requests for money.
Smed and Ćurčić depict a liberal couple watching their self-image disintegrate. They move from empathy to fear to hostility and back again. Throughout the film, you constantly ask yourself: What would I do if this happened to me? The answers are often personally confronting.
Sødahl’s Paradis sits comfortably within a modern wave of ‘middle-class guilt’ cinema. It can be traced back to several clear cinematic predecessors, most notably Sweden’s Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022), which covers similar terrain, but what sets this film apart is that Östlund is clearly making a cinematic exercise. Paradis is highly realistic, and you can see yourself going down the same or a similar path. You can relate to the actions of all characters. There are no good choices, and there is an inevitable tragic resolution.
The film is being shown at the Nordic Film Festival in Melbourne as The Last Resort.
Cinema history 