Paradise: Hope - film review

After bleak visions of sex tourism and religious fanaticism in Love and Faith, respectively, you’d expect the concluding chapter in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy to be the most ironically titled.

But lo, there’s an odd hopefulness to this study of life at a fat farm for Austrian teenagers, where heroine Melli (remarkable newcomer Melanie Lenz), daughter of the first film’s protagonist, has more insecurities to shed than she does pounds.

Seidl still can’t resist queasy humour (Melli has a woefully indulged crush on her middle-aged doctor) and punishing bodily scrutiny — Gillian McKeith never shows up, though you fear she might — but even if Paradise is lost, this remains the trilogy’s best film.