Vivarium (2019)

The last time director Lorcan Finnegan worked with writer Garret Shanley, on their debut feature after collaborating on a fine short, Foxes, they gave viewers a film about someone finding strangeness and potential insanity in an isolated wooded area. This time around they give us a couple finding strangeness and potential insanity in a picture-perfect suburban home.

Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are Gemma and Tom, a young couple looking for their ideal home. They meet a strange agent, Martin (Jonathan Aris), and are then taken to a home in a street of identical homes, in an area full of identical streets. Martin then disappears, leaving Gemma and Tom to find their own way out of the neighbourhood. They can't manage it, and it soon becomes clear that they are somehow always fated to end up back at the front door of what is now their new home. No matter how hard they try to escape, they keep finding themselves back home. And then they receive a child.

That's pretty much everything about Vivarium, and the main plot is fully set up within the first 5-10 minutes. Although I would be hesitant to compare it to something like Blue Velvet, it certainly uses the fantastical concept to illustrate how much the dream of suburban contentment can soon sour and become a nightmare for those who are trapped in it (which, in this case, is a very literal situation).

Visually, you get an excellent exaggeration of most typical modern street layouts. All of these new homes look the same, the streets are the same, and every home even has one fluffy cloud-shaped cloud (you know what I mean) resting just overhead. Finnegan really does all he can to create a vision that is both uniformly mundane and also very creepy.

Shanley's script is a bit less satisfying, but I also admired the fact that he didn't set out to provide any answers for the non-stop string of oddities that make up the various plot points. The child alone (played mostly by Senan Jennings) is one major part of the movie that you never get an explanation for, which doesn't stop him being incredibly creepy and disturbing, but you also get no extra information about the motivation of certain characters, about the logic and physics of the environment, or even how certain things are always worked out (such as deliveries and repairs). Viewers are as bemused as the main characters.

Poots and Eisenberg are very good in the main roles, with the latter becoming more angry and aggressive than the former. They adjust to their new life quite quickly, but that's when they realise they have no choice in the matter. Jennings is excellent as the child, one of the most loathsome little people I have had to endure onscreen, and Eanna Hardwicke does a decent job as the grown-up version of the same character.

I'd recommend Vivarium if you're after something far removed from the norm. Just don't expect answers to any of the questions it puts forwards.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy the movie here.