The Harshness of the Wilderness in French Guiana was No Joke
I'm guessing at least a few people who have seen this movie thought to themselves "why not just run away and live in the woods? It looks like it'd be easy." But history shows why that's a bad idea:
France had repeatedly failed since 1604 to colonize French Guiana. The last attempt at colonization was in 1763, and 75% of the 12,000 colonists that had been sent there died in their first year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Island#Early_penal_system
I imagine a European colonist in French Guiana would feel as though they had been cast out of paradise and into a jungle hellscape; an undescribably immense wilderness comparable to nothing a European of the time would even know existed - no niche for human beings, vibrant and exotic, alien and unwelcoming on all fronts, packed to the brim with bizarre lifeforms in an ecosystem apparently cannibalizing off itself.
Looking at the history of colonization attempts in the region, trying to survive there seemed to often result in being assimilated by the wilderness.
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