I don’t think I’ve seen a film in recent memory that truly captures the feeling of a nightmare like Vivarium. I feel like many people think of horror movies as nightmare fuels, and while that is sometimes the case, in my experience, most of my nightmares take something normal and mundane, and throws it into a oh-so-slightly different light. They take the familiar, and turn it into something that it still recognizable, but with its essence and joy completely removed. That is very much the kind of situation our characters face in the film.
We have Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots), a young couple trying to find a home. They stumble into a strange real estate agent, who leads them to an even stranger suburban neighborhood, and abandons them in one of the houses. The couple naturally try to leave, but find themselves driving in circles. No matter which route they take, they always end up back at the same home. They are trapped, and forced to live in the house like a classic domestic couple, complete with a baby delivered in a package that they have to raise.
The film comes curtesy of Lorcan Finnegan, who is directing from a script by Garret Shanley, and I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen a film that so overtly screams “I’m a metaphor!” as vividly as Vivarium, maybe Darren Aronofsky’s mother! from 2017. Vivarium isn’t concerned with being subtle in its imagery and commentary on the painful mundanity of marriage and domestic life, nor does it even make any attempt at convincing you that any of this is a part of the real world, as it goes really quickly into stylized territory. It’s purposeful in every sense of the word, and meticulously crafted in a way that serves the central metaphor.
As a parable like this goes, you do get it fairly quick, which risks coming off as one-note. The film admittedly loses steam by the time it gets to the hour mark. After all, you can only dramatize apathetic exhaustion for so long before the audience begins to feel the same way. However, what makes the film engaging is down to two things. One, the filmmaking is pretty top notch. I can’t imagine the budget being fairly big, but the money is utilized well, particularly in its production design. Finnegan is also very skilled in balancing tension with a dark sense of humor.
The second thing that keeps the film engaging is the performances. Eisenberg and Poots have worked together previously in last year’s The Art Of Self-Defense (really solid and worth checking out, by the way), so they have a really natural rapport with one another here, and they are both skilled to make material as bizarre as this work by grounding it in a sense of humanity that keeps the film from being emotionally distant. You buy into their relationship, and I was fairly surprised by Eisenberg in particular, who appears to be playing a relatively normal and well adjusted human being for what feels like the first time.
The pleasures of a film like Vivarium mostly comes out of seeing where things go as the film builds and builds with each scene. Just when you think things couldn’t get any more weird and ominous, something new pops up. As a parable on suburbia, there isn’t much here that you haven’t seen before, but it is presented with skill from the cast and crew, a relentlessly oppressive atmosphere, an eye for striking visuals, and a level of viciousness that I can’t help but admire. I don’t know if Vivarium is a film I would ever want to revisit, but I was glad I took the ride nonetheless.