Starring: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Senanayake Jennings, and Eanna Hardwicke
Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment
Runtime: 98 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2020
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This science fiction thriller film is based on a story by the Director of the film (Lorcan Finnegan) and Garret Shanley, who wrote the film’s screenplay. It is an international production involving Denmark, Belgium, and Ireland, and tells a story in horror-format of a young couple, who go on the hunt for a house to live in, and become trapped in a mysterious collection of identical houses.
The young couple,Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and his partner Gemma (Imogen Poots) set out to purchase a house and visit a creepy estate agent, called Martin (Jonathan Aris), who tells them of a new housing development they should look at, called “Yonder”, located in “Vivarium”, and built to provide “Quality Family Homes, Forever”. All the houses in the development look identical. Martin shows them around one of the houses and then disappears. Gemma and Tom try to leave Yonder, but can’t. Everywhere they go seems to take them back to the house they originally looked at. In desperation, they decide to spend the night outside house No. 9, and in the morning, the couple find themselves back in the same environment. Food mysteriously keeps coming and disappearing, and one of the food boxes contains a young infant, who poses a threat.
Disturbed by the sameness of everything and their predicament, Tom sets the No. 9 house on fire and goes to sleep in the street outside. He and Gemma awake to find the house rebuilt and a tiny mutant infant in a food box with written instructions to “raise the child and be released”. The infant grows to a boy (Senanayake Jennings) and then keeps growing (quickly) to a much older person (Eanna Hardwicke). Pushed to a mental crisis, Tom tries to pathologically dig his way out, and attempts to harm the boy. Gemma intervenes, and she and Tom grow apart from one another, but reunite in fear of the boy, who keeps growing, and who later reveals himself as an mutant humanoid. Tom dies, and Gemma pursues the alien through a maze of subterranean corridors to find herself back in No. 9. After a fatal act of defiance by Gemma, the alien buries her next to Tom and subsumes the role of Martin, much like animals in the cuckoo world, behave to “live” their cycle of life. The film ends with another couple coming to Martin, to look for a house.
This is a sci-fi horror movie with an intriguing plot line that doesn’t attempt to ever fully explain itself. “Vivarium” derives from the Latin word, “vivere”, meaning “to live”, but living for the humans in this film means taking a route to certain death. Unsettling violence is present but relatively infrequent, and the film’s imagery is subservient to the complexities of the plot. Half way through the movie, “Yonder” has not revealed its secrets, and the Jazz soundtrack to the movie eerily communicates the couple’s plight. The secret to the movie’s interpretation, which essentially makes the movie an absorbing one, is the cuckoo in the opening sequence. We see a bird that destroys another bird’s family to survive, and the cuckoo’s survival means death to others.
The film tackles substantial themes, a major one being home ownership can be a trap and it explores the complexities of a couple enduring a life of stress for which there is no obvious solution. The acting is uniformly impressive, especially from Imogen Poots. This is not a movie to encourage anyone to have children; the movie begins by showing baby birds exhausting their parents until nothing else remains. It is also an unsettling movie for sharing a home with a demanding, screaming child. “Vivarium” is a metaphor for survival, which the movie translates from the animal to the human world by showing the horrors of very difficult parenting.
The plot slowly reveals itself, but the impact of this movie is to let its chosen metaphor unfold. In this way, the movie bears some similarity to the exceptional film, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” (2017). The metaphor that this film uses, however, is ecological (“That’s nature – just the way things are”), not mythological. This is a movie that cleverly explores the consequences of what it is like to adopt a capitalistic lifestyle which anticipates destruction in a soulless suburbia, built to suffocate its inhabitants.
Peter W. Sheehan
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