Erotic thriller ‘Paradise Cove’ is morally reprehensible trash

A review of the new film, on demand now

Look: it’s no secret that Los Angeles is experiencing a major homelessness crisis. As of last month, an estimated 66,000 people are currently homeless in Los Angeles County in the middle of a deadly pandemic and some of the worst economic fallout in many generations.

Paradise Cove, a new erotic thriller directed by Martin Guigui, attempts to reckon with that context, and in doing so mishandles it in nearly every way. The film is about Knox and Tracey Bannett (Todd Grinnell and Mena Suvari, respectively), a couple who move into Knox’s mother’s beach house in Malibu in order to renovate and flip it. Unfortunately, when they arrive, they discover that there is a homeless woman named Bree (Kristen Bauer van Straten) living underneath the house. Bree isn’t happy about the fact that her shelter is threatened by Knox and Tracey’s renovations, and she sets about making their lives miserable in an attempt to get them to leave and turn the house over to her.

The setup is a clear class metaphor, a thuddingly-obvious upstairs/downstairs representation of the richest people in Los Angeles literally living on top of people who are struggling. There’s potential here; Parasite mined a similarly literalized house-as-class metaphor to…