Main cast: Imogen Poots (Gemma), Jesse Eisenberg (Tom), Jonathan Aris (Martin), Senan Jennings (The Son – Younger), and Eanna Hardwicke (The Son – Older)
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
If you’re anything like me, chances are, you’d look up the meaning of Vivarium before you watch this thing. Actually, I already know what it means, thanks to my days of dabbling in research: it’s an enclosed, controlled environment used to conduct experiments. Then, the movie opens with some stock footage of a cuckoo’s brood parasitic behavior. Sigh, this is like a murder mystery movie that shows me how a murder is carried out before seguing to a murder mystery. Lorcan Finnegan, the director, must be terrible at card games if this is anything to go by.
So yes, the director in the first few minutes of the movie has given the game away, so it’s a matter of catching up with the couple Tom and Gemma as they look for a house to call their own. Upon the invitation of the rather weird-behaving real estate agent Martin, they visit Yonder, a new and still unoccupied development. They are shown a place, which looks like the textbook example of idyllic suburban living, only to later realize that Martin and vanished and they can’t get out of Yonder. No, they really can’t – every turn they make takes them back to that place, and eventually, they decide to spend the rest of the night in the house they are shown, before trying again the next morning.
The next morning, they realize that they are still stuck. They have food and other necessities delivered to them via mysterious means, so they won’t starve or want for anything, but they can’t leave. Even burning the house down is useless, as the house mysteriously reemerges intact and undamaged when the smoke clears. They even find a baby at their doorstep, along with a sign telling them to raise the baby if they ever want to leave. This baby grows up at an unusual rate, too – he is clearly not human. Really now, what is happening and will poor Tom and Gemma ever going to leave this place?
The set pieces in this movie are gorgeous, if quite eerie in how uniformly green and sterile the whole house is – but that’s just things working as intended. Imogen Poots is solid as she manages to inject enough emotions – confusion, fear, even reluctant affection for her adopted whatever-it-is thing – while Jesse Eisenberg for once isn’t twitchy or annoying. His antics in this movie, however, screams “Nicolas Cage is my spirit animal!” so there’s that. I mean, instead of trying to drill information from their adopted what-the-hell-it-is or trying to win it over to their side, he writes profanities on the roof and digs a hole in the garden. It’s hard to take the suburban nightmare fantasy scenario in this movie seriously when Tom is doing his best to be a big ham for no logical reasons.
Aside from that, this movie doesn’t seem to know to what to do with itself. There are many long-drawn scenes of Tom and Gemma being frustrated or scared, or just the camera lingering on the set pieces – guess they want to milk every cent that went into those things – but ultimately, there is no closure or compelling questions for the viewer to ponder. The movie doesn’t even get the cuckoo in a controlled close research facility thing right, as from the beginning the “parents” know right away that the kid-thing isn’t theirs. It’s not exactly brood parasitism, then. Instead, it presents this bizarre scenario that those aliens… or some other things… that are behind this thing apparently only want to emulate human beings and become the perfect real estate agent. That’s depressing, actually. You’d think they would at least aim to be a politician or some other positions of power.
At any rate, Vivarium is okay if it’s left playing in the background while one pays more attention to housework or what-have-you. Watching it more closely, though, only exposes how it is far more flash than substance.
