“4 STARS (OUT OF 4)! Documentarians Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine go into this film with two aces already in hand—a remarkable real-life story...and an amazing cache of home movies made by the inhabitants. They turn in THE MOST IRRESISTIBLE FILM SO FAR OF 2014.”
–Mick LaSalle, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Directors Goldfine and Geller tell their story with such engaged confidence that we are swept along to its wild end. Move over, Charles Darwin, when it comes to great tales about the Galapagos, you've got company.”
–Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“ABSORBING, SUSPENSEFUL! A STORY THIS WELL TOLD DESERVES TO BE RELISHED! Goldfine and Geller pace and structure The Galapagos Affair like the true-crime tale that it is, its mysteries rich and involving, its characters enduring in the imagination long after the film has ended.”
–Alan Scherstuhl, THE VILLAGE VOICE
“FASCINATING.... One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.... I wonder what Charles Darwin would have made of this movie. Survival of the fittest doesn’t begin to explain what happened on Floreana. Grade: B+”
–Peter Rainer, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
“A RIVETING RECONSTUCTION OF PARADISE GONE TO HELL.... Plays out like a game of tropical ‘Clue’ writ large....Cate Blanchett is marvelous.”
–Beth Hanna, THOMPSON ON HOLLYWOOD, INDIEWIRE
“With characteristic poise and intelligence, Goldfine and Geller spin the yarn very well, balancing eccentricity with accessibility. Their film makes judicious use of its subjects’ home movies and of Ritter and Strauch’s usefully articulate writings (read, respectively, by Thomas Kretschmann and Cate Blanchett). Blessed with a great cast of human characters, they also pay keen attention to various beasts, some more domesticated than others.”
–Jonathan Kiefer, SF WEEKLY
“FASCINATING! A stranger-than-fiction gem.”
–Chris Nashawaty, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“The Galapagos Affair has more going for it than most of the claptrap filling multiplexes right now.... A good historical documentary should tell an interesting story in a cohesive way and arouse our interest, even if we know nothing about the subject matter. The Galapagos Affair does just that.”
–Leonard Maltin, INDIEWIRE
“A darkly amusing historical documentary about the fruitless search for paradise on Earth by vainglorious, world-weary dreamers who set themselves above, and apart from, the rest of humanity. The heart of the film...is a hybrid of juicy period soap opera and 'Survivor.'”
–Stephen Holden, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“A story with characters worthy of the richest fiction—including a decadent baroness intent on building a luxury hotel—climaxing in a violent, still unsolved mystery. Nearly a decade in the making, this remarkable documentary recounts the strange and sordid Floreana tale using the actual journals and diaries of the key players, here brought to life by an all-star voice cast. It’s a haunting exploration of wildness, human nature and our struggles to escape what perhaps is inevitable.”
–Scott Foundas, Chief Critic, VARIETY
“There's big trouble in paradise in The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a true-life story so rife with melodrama, exotic lifestyles, sexual intrigue and suspicious deaths that it's surprising that no film has been made about it until now. This inescapably fascinating documentary...combines contemporary material with fantastic film footage taken at the time and excellent dramatic readings by a fine international cast.”
–Todd McCarthy, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“A thrilling and well-crafted documentary about intrigue, murder, and the failure of utopian ideals.”
–Theis Duelund, LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE
“Intriguing...a gripping real-life story.... Sex, violence, bitter conflict and an unresolved murder mystery are the defining aspects of its story of how a plan to set up a new life in a idyllic island location goes so badly wrong.”
–Mark Adams, SCREEN DAILY
“A fascinating, lurid story of paradise sought but not found on the Galapagos Islands, the modern Eden derailed by mystery and maybe even murder... "The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden" includes among its many juicy elements a couple who try to create their own private paradise, unwelcome followers, a fake baroness with two lovers and a rifle in tow, mysterious deaths and disappearances, and one of the looniest silent movies you'll ever see.”
–Bill Goodykoontz, ARIZONA REPUBLIC
“A ‘German nudist-scientist’ and ‘an insatiable baroness’ are among the free-loving and free-thinking exiles and eccentrics who transform an ‘island paradise’ into ‘the most evil sinpit this side of hell’ in The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, an entirely engrossing and entertaining documentary about one of the more bizarre and quaintly lurid if little-remembered mysteries of the 1930s... Constructed with great narrative clarity by directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine... the peculiar fascination exerted by The Galapagos Affair is a testament to our voyeuristic desire for real-life tales of odd characters in awful situations—tales that simultaneously appall (how can such people be?) and comfort (at least my life isn't thisscrewy). Reality TV shows arguably scratch this itch, but the story told in The Galapagos Affair is genuine, not ersatz, and the movie is an example of quality journalism—scholarship, even—in film form. ”
–John Beifuss, COMMERICAL APPEAL
“What happens when seven misanthropic artists and intellectuals from Weimar Germany try to share a tiny, remote island in the Pacific? Misery, Mayhem, and murder. So we learn from The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, a dazzling documentary about an unsolved murder in an ad hoc community in the Galapagos islands in 1934. Co-directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, The Galapagos Affair ... develops these juicy mysteries with great intelligence, wit, and suspense.”
–Tirdad Derakhshani, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
“It would take a series of spoilers to explain who might have killed whom in The Galapagos Affair. See the movie and find out, and revel in the grim gallows humor of... Dayna Goldfine’s and Dan Gellers’ arresting, one-of-a-kind The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden.”
–Gerard Peary, ARTS FUSE
“The title of the documentary might make you expect an activist film about the environmental despoiling of one of the planet's most remote and beguiling places. But this compelling piece of historical detective work is, in fact, less about what people have done to the islands than about what living on the islands has done to people.”
–Mark Mohan, OREGONIAN
“The fascinating, if laboriously titled documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden—directed by Daniel Geller and Danya Goldfine of Ballets Russes fame—tells a true story with universal themes, good guys and gals, bad guys and gals and a locale as exotic as they come. The story unfolds in voice-overs provided by the likes of Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger and Connie Nielsen, and has been accurately pegged as ‘Darwin meets Hitchcock’.”
–James Verniere, BOSTON HERALD
“It’s Killer in every sense of the word.”
–Al Alexander, THE PATRIOT LEDGER
“The denouement plays like a remix of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a chorus of unreliable narrators. Murders are apparently committed, although the slain are never found, and there’s no way to separate the guilty from the merely complicit.”
–Robert Everett-Green, GLOBE AND MAIL
“The Galapagos Affair is a fascinating look at a place of great beauty and remoteness, and at the kind of people drawn to live there. ”
–Moira MacDonald, SEATTLE TIMES
