Film Review: Vivarium
“That’s nature. That’s just the way things are.”
Lorcan Finnegan’s new suburban science fiction feature is a trippy flick that brings the indie power duo of Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots back together again. Fresh off the success of The Art of Self-Defense (2019, dir. Riley Stearns), they play a couple trapped in everyone’s worst nightmare. Parenting. And parenting, topically, separate from the rest of the world.
Gemma and Tom, a couple looking to buy their first home together, find themselves led into a brand-new housing development, Yonder, where all the houses are identical. When the real estate agent who led them in shows them house number 9 and proceeds to disappear completely, they try to leave. Their attempts are to no avail and the couple keeps finding themselves returning to house number 9, over and over, until their car runs out of fuel. After spending a day trying to leave Yonder on foot, they find themselves presented with a box containing a baby boy and the instructions: “RAISE THE CHILD AND BE RELEASED”. The narrative follows Gemma and Tom as they resign themselves to follow the instructions.
The child grows quickly, impatiently demands attention and has an irritating and unsettling talent for impersonating Gemma and Tom’s voices perfectly. As the couple desperately try to understand Yonder and reluctantly raise the child, their lives slowly devolve into meaninglessness, punctuated by trying to understand just what the child is.
Loosely based on Finnegan’s own experiences of the housing crisis in Ireland, where land ownership is a real struggle, Vivarium does an excellent job of articulating the fears of what happens after you get a mortgage. Gemma and Tom fall into seemingly meaningless patterns, Tom even obsessively digging down into a literal hole every day, to no accomplishment. Gemma tries to raise the boy on her own, whilst Tom grows to detest the child. Their lives seem to gradually become joyless and depressing, as the house and boy occupy their entire lives.
Unfortunately, the film as a whole suffers from this shift in tone, as it never seems to pick up after setting up its intriguing, mysterious premise. Eisenberg and Poots’ performances are impressive, but the slowness of the plot makes the film a real slog, that I felt like I was toiling through for much longer than its actual runtime of ninety-seven minutes.
Vivarium is a very grim picture of what parenting can really feel like, and a horrible perspective of the way people can lose what seems to be their entire lives to their children and mortgage. If you’re in the mood for that, great! But don’t expect any answers, you will only finish the film with questions.
Quarantine is no fun. You might be trapped, but hey! At least you aren’t stuck in a labyrinth of green, identical houses and forced to raise a screaming demon child that imitates you and your partner’s every word.
2.5 stars
Vivarium is now available online on Google Play, Youtube and Amazon Video on Demand.