General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Death in the Garden

Death in the Garden (French: La Mort en ce jardin) is a 1956 adventure-drama film directed by Luis Buñuel, made as a co-production between France and Mexico, about a group of fugitives from a South American revolution who flee into the jungle and fight for survival.¹^•² It was released in France on September 21, 1956.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	La Mort en ce jardin (also released as Evil Eden)³
Director and writers	Directed by Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, Raymond Queneau, and Gabriel Arout, from a novel by José-André Lacour⁴
Production	France–Mexico co-production by Films Dismage and Producciones Tepeyac; shot in color on location in Mexico¹^•⁵
Principal cast	Simone Signoret (Djin), Charles Vanel (Castin), Georges Marchal (Chark), Michel Piccoli (Father Lizardi), Michèle Girardon (María Castin)¹
Key crew	Cinematography by Jorge Stahl Jr.; music by Paul Misraki; editing by Marguerite Renoir and Denise Charvein¹
Release and length	September 21, 1956 (France); 104 minutes²
Reception	Middling financially and critically, deemed a failure by Buñuel himself; critics now rate it highly, with a 93% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes from 14 reviews⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in an unnamed South American country where independent diamond miners clash with the local military regime.⁸ When the government revokes the miners' claims and confiscates their equipment, their grievances turn into an uprising that the military crushes.⁶^•⁵

Caught up in the crackdown, a disparate group of characters flees into the jungle: the adventurer Chark, the miner Castin with his deaf-mute daughter María, the prostitute Djin, and the priest Father Lizzardi.⁹^•⁶ In the second half the story shifts into a survival narrative in which hunger and isolation destroy the group's morale and social order.² Critics highlight images from this stretch, including María's hair tangled in tree branches and a boa constrictor devoured by ants, along with the discovery of a crashed plane littering the bush with useless objects.⁶^•¹ According to the FilmAffinity synopsis, only two of the escapees survive.³

Place in Buñuel's career

By 1956 Buñuel had directed 15 productions since moving to Mexico, and the film sits in the middle of his career, between his command of the Mexican studio system and his later return to European productions and overt surrealism.⁶ It belongs to the phase of his work that critics have often overlooked, though reviewer Nathanael Hood called it "as caustic and vicious as anything he ever made".⁷ It was shot in French with a cast of French stars working with Mexican actors and a mostly Mexican crew.⁵^•¹⁰ Glenn Erickson, the DVD columnist known as DVD Savant, places it as the second of a Buñuel political trilogy with Cela s'appelle l'aurore (1955) and El fièvre monte à El Pao, films involving insurrection against power structures in Latin America.⁵

The priest and the church. Michel Piccoli played Father Lizardi, a flawed missionary priest, in the first of his six films for Buñuel; the British Film Institute's program notes describe the film as one of the director's piercing critiques of Christian dogma despite its adventure-thriller surface.¹ Screen Slate's Zak Goodwin calls the character perhaps the most genuinely moral priest Buñuel put on screen, with the exception of Father Nazario in Nazarín.⁶

Themes and style

The first half works within the action-adventure template while Buñuel takes aim at organized religion and authoritarian military regimes; the second half indulges his surrealist touches.⁶ Goodwin identifies the film's central theme as one Buñuel would perfect in later work: the reemergence of people's subconscious desires and self-destructive tendencies when removed from the constraints of social order.⁶ The critic Luc Moullet, writing in 1956, read the film's animals, from the jungle fauna to the boa constrictor and the cat, as charged with meaning, the animal being "a soulless being that strolls through events and things of the universe without understanding anything".¹¹ Fernando F. Croce compares the first half to Buñuel's admiration for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and hears the second half scored to squeaking birdcalls and simian chattering, while noting that the disintegration-and-restoration structure resurfaces in The Exterminating Angel and that Herzog's inspirations for Aguirre, the Wrath of God are visible here.¹¹

Reception and legacy

The film proved middling in its original financial and critical reception, and Buñuel himself deemed it a failure.⁶ Vincent Canby of The New York Times, reviewing a revival in 1977, found it "full of marvelous, uniquely Buñuelian moments set in a melodramatic custard" and wrote that it should not be missed by viewers who already knew the director's work, though it was not a film by which to be introduced to him.¹¹ Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called it "no masterpiece, but a prime example of subversive cinema".⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 93% Tomatometer from 14 critics, against a 57% audience score from more than 250 ratings.⁷

Because the film was long difficult to see, even the critic Raymond Durgnat once got its plot synopsis wrong, as Erickson notes.⁵ Later home-video releases, including a Microcinema DVD in 2009 and an Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray with a restored 1080p transfer, interviews with Michel Piccoli and the film scholar Victor Fuentes, and an essay booklet, returned the film to circulation.⁵^•¹² Fuentes suggested the film was a trampoline for other Buñuel films, with its theme of exile connecting it to the director's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.¹³ A 2009 Slant Magazine review also noted that the film captures Simone Signoret in color for the first time.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026