Some Kind of Heaven Peels Back the Curtain on Florida’s Largest Retirement Paradise
The Villages is a retirement community sprawling across some 57 square miles of three Central Florida counties, with its own zip codes, golf courses, and town squares. It’s also one of the strangest places in America.
Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven takes you inside. Produced by Darren Aronofsky and shot with candy-colored cinematography, the 2021 documentary follows four people searching for meaning behind the gates: a couple grappling with one partner’s psychedelic spiral, a widow hunting for second love, and an 82-year-old bachelor living out of his van and looking for a wealthy woman to take him in. What starts as a quirky portrait of shuffleboard and synchronized swimming turns into something more tender and unsettling.
Oppenheim, who started the project as his Harvard undergraduate thesis, captures a Florida most visitors never see: not the beaches or the theme parks, but the manufactured paradise where tens of thousands of retirees chase happiness on a loop. It holds a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.
