Ireland/Denmark/Belgium | 2019 | Directed by Lorcan Finnegan
Logline: A young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighbourhood of identical houses.
Gemma (Imogen Poots) and her husband Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are keen to acquire their first home. They have stable jobs at an elementary school, and are happy in their relationship. They visit a local starter home company, and meet Martin (Jonathan Aris), the very odd real estate agent, whose robotic, perfunctory manner has them both disarmed and bemused. They are swiftly talked into following him in their car to the brand new neighbourhood subdivision called Yonder, which promises the perfect forever home on its welcome sign.
The young couple are happy to humour the insistent Martin. But Yonder is not the Pleasantville Tom and Gemma were reluctantly anticipating. It is something deeply sinister. The first thing that hits you smack between the eyes is the peculiar uniform look of the subdivision. Row upon row upon row upon row of identical homes. And not a single person in sight. Martin takes the curious couple into #9. They reveal that they have no children (yet). Martin makes a mental note. While Tom and Gemma inspect the modest backyard, Martin takes his cue to leave. Tom and Gemma are perplexed, and decide they need to leave Yonder immediately. But Yonder has other, more long term, plans for them.
Tom and Gemma find themselves trapped in Yonder. They drive around all night long trying to find a way out of the labyrinthine streets, always ending up back at #9. The car runs out of petrol. The next morning Tom climbs a ladder and peers over the roof, only to see identical houses stretching back as far as the eye can see. Adding a strange insult to injury, the sky is perfect blue filled with little fluffy clouds, like out of some Norman Rockwell painting. It’s decidedly creepy. Tom and Gemma are forced to camp, so to speak. Then a baby is delivered in a box on the street outside, with the message, “Raise the child and be released.”
To say Vivarium - a Latin word which describes an artificial environment for studying a living organism - is a surreal analogy on the socioeconomic ruin of capitalism, the inherent fragility of the role of motherhood in the modern world, and the significance of the cradle to the grave, where the parents are conditioned and folded to foster the incubation and product perfect of the child, is putting it mildly. There is the role of gender, of sexism, misogyny, and performance. Of how all of these elements within the family unit exacerbates a terrifyingly mundane reality: the family as a mode of production. Or more precisely, the mother as hegemonic central figure, and not necessarily the biological one.
But on the surface, Vivarium is a science fiction horror tale about a race of super-intelligent extra-terrestrial beings who are using human adults as pawns in their elaborate plan to take over the world. Or thereabouts. And, Vivarium is all about surfaces. The sheen, the veneer, the false sense of security.
The screenplay by Garret Shanley is a bold and disturbing one, from a story by Shanley and director Lorcan Finnegan. The direction is taut, with solid performances from Poots and Eisenberg, but special mention two of the Yonder “robots”, Aris as Martin and Senan Jennings as the couple’s young boy (though voiced by various adults). The production design and clever integration of visual effects is a stand-out, fuelling the movie’s overtly nightmarish tone and vibe. Indeed Vivarium operates acutely like a genuine bad dream. Those ones were everything begins “normal” then peels away on a slow-burn ruin of increasing weirdness and wrongness.
But the (un)reality is that Vivarium doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and refuses to offer any simple explanation. It’s a most bitter tea, not for all tastes. In fact, the narrative deliberately denies the viewer any kind of reward, and on several occasions will push the buttons of isolation and parental tolerance. A frightening “tear”, a reveal, close to the movie’s denouement implodes as an exposure of the insidious source of the nightmare, instead ramifying everything the suburban white noise has been blaring out since the movie’s opening sequence which depicts a baby cuckoo fighting viciously for dominance in another bird’s nest as it awaits the mother and the all-important sustenance.
Life, it appears, is all about jockeying for pole position, and the race is murder.
Viviarium is available on VOD on Google Play, iTunes, Telstra, Fetch and Umbrella Entertainment, and Foxtel on Demand from May 6.