By turns puckish and grim, “Paradise Hills” is just the latest female-driven dystopian story to hit screens. Maybe it’s the times, and these chronicles of peril and resistance represent a mood (or a game plan). Whatever the reason, the bad times keep coming for women, who have battled odds, other people and sometimes monsters in modest fairy tales like “Endzeit” and “Into the Forest” as well as in larger-scaled apocalyptic fictions like “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

The name “Paradise Hills” refers to a rehabilitation center on a verdant island. Its isolation is an early clue that something isn’t right on this putative Shangri-La where a young woman, Uma (Emma Roberts), is yelling to be let out of a locked room. It’s a pretty prison, with a grassy carpet and a painted landscape spreading across the walls. Sun streams in from overhead, a taunting promise of the larger, lighter open world, and a resonant image in a movie filled with telegraphing visuals.

Warmth proves as elusive as escape does. Uma soon discovers that Paradise Hills is a rehab center for privileged young women who don’t conform to their family’s antediluvian norms of femininity. Overseen by the Duchess (an amusing Milla Jovovich ), the women undergo various treatments, some more willingly than others. In flouncy old-fashioned uniforms, they cavort and submit, though some eye the exit. When they exercise, they don’t break a sweat; at dinner, they eat enforced meager rations. Like exotic birds in gilded cages, they are at once pampered and imprisoned.

The director Alice Waddington sets the look and mood swiftly, most successfully through the costumes and the production design, both adorned with dollops of color and witty, texture-enriching filigree. While the Duchess floats through the orderly grounds like a Stepford Scarlett O’Hara — straw hats, cascading gowns, blank smiles — the inmates are pointedly dressed in girlish outfits, virginal white from their neck ruffs to their high-button boots. They sleep in identical beds in identical billowy nighties and wander around in dresses with Elizabethan-style bodices that flatten their breasts, as if to retard (and deny) their maturity and independence .